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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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Stephen Leacock
Age: 74 †
Born: 1869
Born: December 30
Died: 1944
Died: March 28
Economist
Humorist
Political Scientist
Writer
Hants
Stephen Butler Leacock
Medicine
Class
Literature
Reading
Music
Classics
Book
Machinery
Primitive
Belong

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When actors begin to think, it's time for a change. They are not fitted for it.
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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.
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Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.
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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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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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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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In ancient times they had no statistics so they had to fall back on lies.
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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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Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.
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The sorrows and disasters of Europe always brought fortune to America.
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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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Hockey captures the essence of Canadian experience in the New World. In a land so inescapably and inhospitably cold, hockey is the chance of life, and an affirmation that despite the deathly chill of winter we are alive.
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The Victorians needed parody. Without it their literature would have been a rank and weedy growth, over-watered with tears.
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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.
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Humour is essentially a comforter, reconciling us to things as they are in contrast to things as they might be.
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You can never have international peace as long as you have national poverty.
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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.
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The parent who could see his boy as he really is, would shake his head and say: 'Willie is no good I'll sell him.
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All Dickens's humour couldn't save Dickens, save him from his overcrowded life, its sordid and neurotic central tragedy and its premature collapse. But Dickens's humour, and all such humour, has saved or at least greatly served the world.
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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.
Stephen Leacock