Explore "Authority" by Ambrose Bierce on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
"Authority, authority!" they shout / Whose minds, not large enough to hold a doubt, / Some chance opinion ever entertain, / By dogma billeted upon their brain. / "Ha!" they exclaim with choreatic glee, / "Here's Dabster if you won't give in to me -- / Dabster, sir, Dabster, to whom all men look / With reverence!" The fellow wrote a book.
It matters not that many another wight / Has thought more deeply, could more wisely write / On t' other side -- that you yourself possess / Knowledge where Dabster did but faintly guess.
God help you if ambitious to persuade / The fools who take opinion ready-made / And "recognize authorities." Be sure / No tittle of their folly they'll abjure / For all that you can say. But write it down, / Publish and die and get a great renown -- / Faith! how they'll snap it up, misread, misquote, / Swear that they had a hand in all you wrote, / And ride your fame like monkeys on a goat!