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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
Reading
Music
Classics
Book
Machinery
Primitive
Belong
Medicine
Class
Literature

More quotes by 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.
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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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I've seen lifelong friends drift apart over golf just because one could play better, but the other counted better.
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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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Modern critics, who refuse to let a plain thing alone, have now started a theory that Cervantes's work is a vast piece of symbolism. If so, Cervantes didn't know it himself and nobody thought of it for three hundred years. He meant it as a satire upon the silly romances of chivalry.
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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Advertising: the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.
Stephen Leacock
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You can never have international peace as long as you have national poverty.
Stephen Leacock
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Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.
Stephen Leacock
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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.
Stephen Leacock
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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.
Stephen Leacock
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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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Too much has been said of the heroes of history-the strong men, the troublesome men too little of the amiable, the kindly, the tolerant.
Stephen Leacock
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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.
Stephen Leacock
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Humour in its highest reach mingles with pathos: it voices sorrow for our human lot and reconciliation with it.
Stephen Leacock
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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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American politicians do anything for money... English politicians take the money and won't do anything.
Stephen Leacock
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In Canada we have enough to do keeping up with two spoken languages ... so we just go right ahead and use English for literature, Scotch for sermons, and American for conversation.
Stephen Leacock
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The sorrows and disasters of Europe always brought fortune to America.
Stephen Leacock
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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.
Stephen Leacock