John Roberts wrote today's Supreme Court opinion in which a 6-member majority struck down the Biden administration's forgiveness of most of the student loan debt in the country. Whatever the merits of the court's decision, the Chief Justice included this allusive gem in his opinion:
From a few narrowly delineated situations specified by Congress, the Secretary [of Education] has expanded forgiveness to nearly every borrower in the country. The Secretary's plan has 'modified' the cited provisions only in the same sense that 'the French Revolution 'modified' the status of the French nobility' - it has abolished them and supplanted them with a new regime entirely.
The Chief Justice is quoting from Antonin Scalia's opinion in MCI Telecommunications Corp. v. American Telephone & Telegraph Co., 512 US 128 (1994), which turned in part on the definition of "modify." In that case Justice Scalia wrote, "It might be good English to say that the French Revolution 'modified' the status of the French nobility - but only because there is a figure of speech called understatement and a literary device known as sarcasm."
Justice Scalia did not credit any earlier source for his bon mot. I suspect he was inspired, perhaps unconsciously, by Ambrose Bierce's work "The Devil's Dictionary," in which he defined "abridge" as "to shorten," attributing this fictive mashup of a sentence from the Declaration of Independence to Oliver Cromwell as an example of "abridge" in use:
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for people to abridge their king, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.