(385–303BC) Chinese philosopher one of the principal interpreters of Confucianism.
(also: 100 most influential people in the world)
(also: mencius quotes)

(n.) any of a series of organic substances derived from a specific set of carbon monomer bases which living beings assimilate through digestion in order to perpetuate their lives, as though it will fill the holes in their sad little existences

(noun):
A mythological figure in spandex, armed with superpowers and a wardrobe that defies practicality. They battle villains, save the day, and occasionally face existential crises about their secret identities.

(also: superhero)
(also: american art of saving the day)

(noun): The ultimate magic trick, where prices rise, and your money vanishes, and nobody knows where it went. The government and the wealthy know the secret, but they ain't telling. Inflation, the ultimate way to redistribute wealth, and make the poor, poorer and the rich, richer, all while making the masses believe it's just a natural occurrence.

Satire, as understood by dunces and all such as suffer from an impediment in their wit.
(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

Sky water that makes your already bad day even worse

(v.) acting out of a belief that being good in one situation then allows you to be a dick in another.

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/why-good-deeds-can-cause-moral-backsliding.html

A book that is commonly edited by a fool. Many persons of some small distinction compile scrap-books containing whatever they happen to read about themselves or employ others to collect. One of these egotists was addressed in the lines following, by Agamemnon Melancthon Peters:

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Dear Frank, that scrap-book where you boast
You keep a record true
Of every kind of peppered roast
That's made of you;

Wherein you paste the printed gibes
That revel round your name,
Thinking the laughter of the scribes
Attests your fame;

Where all the pictures you arrange
That comic pencils trace —
Your funny figure and your strange
Semitic face —

Pray lend it me. Wit I have not,
Nor art, but there I'll list
The daily drubbings you'd have got
Had God a fist.


(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

collectively, all the processes required to get from ingredients to the desired finished food or dish. I include combining and arranging, like for a salad or a sandwich with ham and cheese, which require no actual heating or other transformation of the ingredients, but some may not (that is, they may only consider it cooking if you actually CHANGE the ingredient in some way like heat it or perhaps cure it).

(also: list of hobbies)

a small mammal seen as uncute because it is small and furry.

to stand on one's knees, shins, and hyperextended toes

(n.) East Asian culture fetish; when weeabooism goes too far

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde
(also: Oscar Wilde quotes)

The major problem with the medical profession in the most advanced sectors of the galaxy had to tackle after cures had been found for all major diseases, and instant repair systems had been found for all physical injuries and disablements except some of the more advanced forms of death, was that of employment.

Planets full of bronzed healthy clean limbed individuals merrily prancing through their lives meant that the only doctors still in business were the psychiatrists, simply because no one had discovered a cure for the Universe as a whole -- or rather the only one that did exist had been abolished by the medical doctors.

Then it was noticed that like most forms of medical treatment, total cures had a lot of unpleasant side effects. Boredom, listlessness, lack of... well anything very much, and with these conditions came the realization that nothing turned, say, a slightly talented musician into a towering genius faster than the problem of encroaching deafness, and nothing turned a perfectly healthy individual into a great politician or military leader better than irreversible brain damage.

Suddenly, everything changed. Previous best selling books such as How I Survived an Hour with a Sprained Finger were swept away in a flood of titles such as How I Scaled the North Face of the Megapurna with a Perfectly Healthy Finger But Everything Else Sprained, Broken or Bitten Off By a Pack of Mad Yaks.

And so doctors were back in business recreating all the diseases and injuries they had abolished in popular easy to use forms. Thus, given the right and instantly available types of disability even something as simple as turning of the 3-D TV could become a major chanllenge, and when all the programmes on all the channels actually were made by actors with cleft pallettes speaking lines by dyslexic writers filmed by blind cameramen instead of merely seeming like that, it somehow made the whole thing more worthwhile.

Literally, the Place of All the Demons. Most of them have escaped into politics and finance, and the place is now used as a lecture hall by the Audible Reformer. When disturbed by his voice the ancient echoes clamor appropriate responses most gratifying to his pride of distinction.
(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

n. A crowd; the source of political wisdom and virtue. In a republic, the object of the statesman's adoration. "In a multitude of consellors there is wisdom," saith the proverb. If many men of equal individual wisdom are wiser than any one of them, it must be that they acquire the excess of wisdom by the mere act of getting together. Whence comes it? Obviously from nowhere — as well say that a range of mountains is higher than the single mountains composing it. A multitude is as wise as its wisest member if it obey him; if not, it is no wiser than its most foolish.

(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

adj. Unlike a menagerie lion. Leonine verses are those in which a word in the middle of a line rhymes with a word at the end, as in this famous passage from Bella Peeler Silcox:

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The electric light invades the dunnest deep of Hades.
Cries Pluto, 'twixt his snores: "O tempora! O mores!"

---

It should be explained that Mrs. Silcox does not undertake to teach pronunciation of the Greek and Latin tongues. Leonine verses are so called in honor of a poet named Leo, whom prosodists appear to find a pleasure in believing to have been the first to discover that a rhyming couplet could be run into a single line.
(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

(n.) talking good, like what I do

one who attempts to defend an idea without letting on that they find it defensible

In Latin, the beak of a bird or the prow of a ship. In America, a place from which a candidate for office energetically expounds the wisdom, virtue and power of the rabble.
(also: The Devil's Dictionary)