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Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.

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
Written
Whole
Encyclopedia
Would
Wonderland
Alice
Sooner
Personally
Ignorance
Imagination

More quotes by Stephen Leacock

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Charles Dickens' creation of Mr. Pickwick did more for the elevation of the human race - I say it in all seriousness - than Cardinal Newman's Lead Kindly Light Amid the Encircling Gloom. Newman only cried out for light in the gloom of a sad world. Dickens gave it.
Stephen Leacock
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When actors begin to think, it's time for a change. They are not fitted for it.
Stephen Leacock
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Most people tire of a lecture in ten minutes clever people can do it in five. Sensible people never go to lectures at all. But the people who do go to a lecture and who get tired of it, presently hold it as a sort of grudge against the lecturer personally. In reality his sufferings are worse than theirs.
Stephen Leacock
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It takes a good deal of physical courage to ride a horse. This, however, I have. I get it at about forty cents a flask, and take it as required.
Stephen Leacock
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My parents migrated to Canada in 1876, and I decided to go with them.
Stephen Leacock
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The road comes to an end just when it ought to be getting somewhere. The passengers alight, shaken and weary, to begin, all over again, something else.
Stephen Leacock
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Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult.
Stephen Leacock
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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.
Stephen Leacock
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Chess is one long regret.
Stephen Leacock
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There is no doubt that many things in life come to us...at backrounds so to speak. Happiness is one of them.
Stephen Leacock
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Anybody who has listened to certain kinds of music, or read certain kinds of poetry, or heard certain kinds of performances on the concertina, will admit that even suicide has its brighter aspects.
Stephen Leacock
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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.
Stephen Leacock
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I am what is called a professor emeritus—from the Latin e, 'out,' and meritus, 'so he ought to be.
Stephen Leacock
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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.
Stephen Leacock
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Being a specialist is one thing, getting a job is another.
Stephen Leacock
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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.
Stephen Leacock
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Humor may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life, and the artistic expression thereof.
Stephen Leacock
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Each section of the British Isles has its own way of laughing, except Wales, which doesn't.
Stephen Leacock
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In ancient times they had no statistics so they had to fall back on lies.
Stephen Leacock
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Humour is essentially a comforter, reconciling us to things as they are in contrast to things as they might be.
Stephen Leacock