Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.

Debt, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slavedriver.

ALDERMAN, n. An ingenious criminal who covers his secret thieving with a pretence of open marauding.

Insurance - an ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.

A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms against himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it.

Clairvoyant, n.: A person, commonly a woman, who has the power of seeing that which is invisible to her patron - namely, that he is a blockhead.