The Devil's Dictionary: Time for a revised edition?

I'm reading John Le Carre's novel The Constant Gardener and note, with pleasure that—on my limited reading of him—he appears to becoming more Graham Greene-like. By which I mean more than his having paid hommage to the Master with The Tailor of Panama. With the demise of the Cold War and the decreased need, in Britain at least, for spies of the George Smiley type, his sweep is becoming more global, more overtly lefty—engaged with the world and more obvious in his empathy.

What prompts these reflections is a line spoken by Gloria Woodrow, the once-potentially brilliant, now-pitiably (and bubble-headedly) pliable wife of the Head of Chancery in Nairobi. (Le Carre writes of her, tellingly, "Yet Gloria Woodrow was not naturally stupid." Not naturally—what a wealth of bitter detail is crammed within that comic-tragic notation.) Consoling the grieving husband of a murdered woman, Gloria reminds him, wholly without awareness of any implicit irony, that "We can't go round treating people as if they were going to drop dead any minute, or we'd never get anywhere."

We can't go round treating people as if they were going to drop dead any minute, or we'd never get anywhere.

Was there ever a more succinct summation of the way of things? No, not the way of things—the way we've made of things. (Wasn't there once a young rabbi in Jerusalem who was quoted as saying "That which you do to the least of these, you also do to me"? A detail conveniently omitted by the roving bands of thugs who, amusingly, call themselves Fundamentalist Christians.) Perhaps if we did "go round treating people as if they were going to drop dead any minute," we might have less cause for regret ourselves. Certainly we might cause less pain in others.

I think it's time for a new edition of The Devil's Dictionary. I don't suppose Bierce would mind terribly if I appended his masterwork with an epigram of my own. And if so, he's dead, and beyond legal action.

Political Correctness. n.
The soul-chilling notion that all people are worthy of respect.