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[W]ithout humour you cannot run a sweetie-shop, let alone a nation.

John Buchan

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John Buchan
Age: 64 †
Born: 1875
Born: August 26
Died: 1940
Died: February 11
Barrister
Biographer
Former Governor General Of Canada
Journalist
Military Personnel
Novelist
Poet
Politician
Science Fiction Writer
Perth
Scotland
John Buchan
1st Baron Tweedsmuir
Lord Tweedsmuir
Funny
Sweetie
Running
Shop
Cannot
Humour
Shops
Nation
Humor
Alone
Nations

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I believe that all wisdom consists in caring immensely for a few right things, and not caring a straw about the rest.
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What would you call the highest happiness, Lewie? he asked. The sense of competence, was the answer, given without hesitation.
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I once played the chief part in a rather exciting business without ever once budging from London . And the joke of it was that the man who went out to look for adventure only saw a bit of the game, and I who sat in my chambers saw it all and pulled the strings. 'They also serve who only stand and wait,' you know.
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He disliked emotion, not because he felt lightly, but because he felt deeply.
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An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.
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London is like the tropical bush -- if you don't exercise constant care the jungle, in the shape of the slums, will break in.
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Wise men never grow up indeed, they grow younger, for they lose the appalling worldly wisdom of youth.
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But some love not the method of your first Romance they count it, throw't away as dust If I should meet with such, what should I say Must I slight them as they slight me, or nay
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Without humility there can be no humanity.
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The task of leadership is not to put greatness into people, but to elicit it, for the greatness is there already.
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He who would valiant be against all disaster let him in constancy follow the Master. There's no discouragement shall make him once relent his first avowed intent to be a pilgrim.
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I was a peaceful sedentary man, a lover of a quiet life, with no appetite for perils and commotions. But I was beginning to realise that I was very obstinate.
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Any large-scale organization must lose some of the merits of its rudimentary beginnings. Quantity will have a coarsening effect on quality.
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In our modern world we have seen inaugurated the reign of a dull bourgeois rationalism, which finds some inadequate reason for all things in heaven and earth and makes a god of its own infallibility.
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I would have been content with any job however thankless, in any quarter however remote, if I had a chance of making a corner of the desert blossom and the solitary place glad.
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I am an ordinary sort of fellow, not braver than other people, but I hate to see a good man downed, and that long knife would not be the end of Scudder if I could play the game in his place.
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Every man at the bottom of his heart believes that he is a born detective.
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We can pay our debts to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.
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