An ever-expanding collection of some literary definitions I enjoy:

• Academic:   a well-fed, elite, institutionalized thinker of the late 20th [and early 21st] century, who crafts ideas for his peers with the assurance that the consequences of those solutions should not and will not necessarily apply to himself. (V.D. Hanson)
• Ambassador:   an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country. (Sir Henry Wotton)
• Amnesty: An act in which the rulers pardon the injustices they have committed. (Ambrose Bierce)
• Book:  a squarish chunk of hot, smoking conscience — and nothing else! (Boris Pasternak)
• Boredom:  the dissolution of pain in time. (Ernst Jünger)
• Citizenship: ruling and being ruled. (Aristotle)
• Child: a sort of vicious dwarf, innately cruel, which combines the worst features of the species, and from whom domestic pets keep a wise distance. (Michel Houellebecq)
• Comedy: the mirror of custom. (Cicero)
• Conventional Wisdom: the state of collective indoctrination. (John Waters, Irish)
• Conservative: a person who tries to stope liberals from breaking liberals’ own rules. (Barton Swaim)
• Cultural Studies: a kind of supremely unrigorous social studies practiced by people who believe all art is propaganda. (Alice Gribbin)
• Criticism:     the art of learning the hidden paths that lead from poem to poem. (Harold Bloom)
• Decadence: A very convenient word for ignorant pedagogues; a vague word behind which our laziness and lack of curiosity concerning the law seek shelter. (Baudelaire)
• Discipline:   being terrified of the right things. (Jordan Peterson)
• Discipline:   The way man maintains contact with pain. (Ernst Jünger)
• Economics:   a highly sophisticated field of thought that is superb at explaining to policymakers precisely why the choices they made in the past were wrong. (Ben Bernanke)
• Economics:   the task of teaching man how little he knows about what he imagines he can design. (Friedrich Hayek)
• Fanaticism:   redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim. (George Santayana)
• Fascist: a conservation who is winning an argument (according to a liberal). (Jonah Goldberg)
• Gentleman: a man who can play the saxophone, but doesn’t. (W.C.Fields)
• (a) Great Book: a text that has never finished saying what it has to say. (Italo Calvino)
• Justice: the limitation of the liberty of each in the interest of the liberty for all, in so far as this can be achieved by a system of laws (Kant)
• Law:   nothing other than a declaration of the general will… and we shall find that very few nations have laws. (Rousseau)
• Lunatic: a person who has lost everything besides his reason. (G.K. Chesterton)
• Mensch:   a person who happily throws one’s life on fate’s great scale if necessary, but at the same time enjoys every bright day and every beautiful cloud. (Rosa Luxemburg)
• Mercantilism:   the use of state power to expand the economy for the sake of increasing state power (Gay&Webb)
• Millenarianism: the vengeful fantasy of the dispossessed, the hope for a great awakening in the midst of a great disappointment. (Yuri Slezkine)
• Music:   the art of the soul. (Georg Wilhelm Hegel)
• Myth:   a description of a real event as perceived by a fool and refined by a poet. (Arkady Strugatsky)
• National Character:   a wonder-working spirit, at the beck and call of every embarrassed historian, a sort of deus ex machina, which is invoked to settle any problem which cannot readily be solved by ordinary methods of rational investigation. (Frederic William Matiland)
• Nationalism: a state of mind in which you do not love your own country as much as you hate somebody else’s. (Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen)
• Novel: a cultural institution in which the rich and potentially threatening disorder of human desire and fear may flow into productive channels, a theatre of Dionysus. (Stephen Dowden)
• Opera: When a tenor and soprano want to make love, but are prevented from doing so by a baritone. (George Bernard Shaw)
• People, The: those of adult age, not declining in life, of tolerable leisure for such discussions [of politics], and of some means of information, and who are above menial dependence. (Edmund Burke)
• Pluralism: championing everything except existing reality/ in favor of everything that exists someplace else (John Waters, Irish)
• Politicians:   people who are plagued by the notion that they must tell others how to live in order to ‘make the world a better place’ (Ivan Klima)
• Politics: the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies. (Groucho Marx)
• Politics: the executive expression of human immaturity. (Vera Brittain)
• Romanticism: the abuse of adjectives. (Alfred de Musset)
• Socialism: the rational and scientific effort of a united and heroic people to overcome difficulties — that don’t exist anywhere else. (anonymous young man in East Germany)
• Social Justice: a semantic fraud from the same stable as People’s Democracy. (F. Hayeck)
• Specialist:   a barbarian whose ignorance is not well-rounded. (Stanislaw Lem)
• State, The: that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else. (Frédéric Bastiat)
• Superfluous Man : He is usually an aristocrat, intelligent, well-educated, and informed by idealism and goodwill but incapable, for reasons as complex as Hamlet’s, of engaging in effective action. (Ency. Brit.)
• Theory:   a fig leaf for mediocrity. (?)
• Threat:   weapons of the clumsy (G. de Prounincq, 1588)
• Tragedy: the beauty of intolerable truths. (Edith Hamilton)
• Vegetarian: an old Indian word for ‘poor hunter’
• Whig History:  the story of English liberty, founded by Magna Carta, consolidated by the Glorious Revolution, expanded by the Great Reform Bill, and reaching its highest achievement with the Labour government. (A.J.P.Taylor)
• Wisdom: the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience. (David Bentley Hart)
• Words: words are things, and a small drop of ink, Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces /That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think. (Byron)
• Writer (a good one): a person who will describe something in such a way that the thing described has the soul of the reader in it. (Roger Scruton)