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What's green, hangs on a wall and whistles? [A Herring]

Leo Rosten

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Leo Rosten
Age: 88 †
Born: 1908
Born: January 1
Died: 1997
Died: January 1
Lexicographer
Linguist
Novelist
Political Scientist
Screenwriter
Writer
Lodz
Leo Calvin Rosten
Herring
Hangs
Green
Wall
Whistles

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Thinking is harder work than hard work.
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Words must surely be counted among the most powerful drugs man ever invented.
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Machines certainly can solve problems, store information, correlate, and play games - but not with pleasure.
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The fellow who laughs last may laugh best, but he gets the reputation of being very slow-witted.
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Everyone, in some small sacred sanctuary of the self, is nuts.
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Happiness comes only when we push our brains and hearts to the farthest reaches of which we are capable.
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If a picture is worth a thousand words, please paint me the Gettysburg Address.
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Proverbs often contradict one another, as any reader soon discovers. The sagacity that advises us to look before we leap promptly warns us that if we hesitate we are lost that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but out of sight, out of mind.
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I learned that it is the weak who are cruel, and that gentleness is to be expected only from the strong.
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Hope is ambiguous, but fear is precious.
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You understand people better if you look at them-no matter how old or impressive or important they may be-as if they were children. For most men never mature they simply grow taller.
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Where there is too much, something is missing.
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Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.
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Money can't buy happiness, but neither can poverty.
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You can learn much about life from a checker game: surrender one to take two don't make two moves at one time move up, not down and when you reach the top, you may move as you like.
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The purpose of life is to matter, to be productive, to have it make a difference that you lived at all-using the talents that God has given you for the betterment of others.
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The first printed mention of bagels... is to be found in the Community Regulations of Kracow, Poland, for the year 1610 which stated that bagels would be given as a gift to any woman in childbirth.
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In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.
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Humor is, I think, the subtlest and chanciest of literary forms. It is surely not accidental that there are a thousand novelists, essayists, poets or journalists for each humorist. It is a long, long time between James Thurbers.
Leo Rosten
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Courage is the capacity to confront what can be imagined.
Leo Rosten