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Men are able to trust one another, knowing the exact degree of dishonesty they are entitled to expect.

Stephen Leacock

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Stephen Leacock
Age: 74 †
Born: 1869
Born: December 30
Died: 1944
Died: March 28
Economist
Humorist
Political Scientist
Writer
Hants
Stephen Butler Leacock
Economy
Dishonesty
Knowing
Exact
Another
Entitled
Able
Degree
Men
Honesty
Degrees
Expect
Trust

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The landlady of a boarding-house is a parallelogram - that is, an oblong angular figure, which cannot be described, but which is equal to anything
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In ancient times they had no statistics so they had to fall back on lies.
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Newspapermen learn to call a murderer an alleged murderer and the King of England the alleged King of England in order to avoid libel suits.
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With the Great Detective, to think was to act, and to act was to think. Frequently he could do both together.
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The classical scholars have kept alive the tradition of the superiority of the ancient languages -- a kaleidoscopic mass of suffixes and prefixes, supposed to represent an infinite shading of meaning. It is a character they share with the Ojibway and the Zulu.
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Chess is one long regret.
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It is difficult to be funny and great at the same time. Aristophanes and Moliere and Mark Twain must sit below Aristotle and Bossuet and Emerson.
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I've seen lifelong friends drift apart over golf just because one could play better, but the other counted better.
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The sorrows and disasters of Europe always brought fortune to America.
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The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.
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Presently I shall be introduced as 'this venerable old gentleman' and the axe will fall when they raise me to the degree of 'grand old man'. That means on our continent any one with snow-white hair who has kept out of jail till eighty.
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There is an old motto that runs, If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. This is nonsense. It ought to read, If at first you don't succeed, quit, quit at once.
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About the only good thing you can say about old age is, it's better than being dead!
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A lone maple leaf resting on sand Have you ever been out for a late autumn walk in the closing part of the afternoon, and suddenly looked up to realize that the leaves have practically all gone? And the sun has set and the day gone before you knew it, and with that a cold wind blows across the landscape? That's retirement.
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Now, the essence, the very spirit of Christmas is that we first make believe a thing is so, and lo, it presently turns out to be so.
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If every day in the life of a school could be the last day but one, there would be little fault to find with it.
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The great man... walks across his century and leaves the marks of his feet all over it, ripping out the dates on his goloshes as he passes.
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Indeed I have always found that the only thing in regard to Toronto which faraway people know for certain is that McGill University is in it.
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In earlier times they had no statistics and so they had to fall back on lies. Hence the huge exaggerations of primitive literature, giants, miracles, wonders! It's the size that counts. They did it with lies and we do it with statistics: but it's all the same.
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Golf may be played on Sunday, not being a game within the view of the law, but being a form of moral effort.
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