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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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Stephen Leacock
Age: 74 †
Born: 1869
Born: December 30
Died: 1944
Died: March 28
Economist
Humorist
Political Scientist
Writer
Hants
Stephen Butler Leacock
Lying
Times
Fall
Back
Statistics
Ancient
Computer
Lies
Economy

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We think of the noble object for which the professor appears tonight, we may be assured that the Lord will forgive any one who will laugh at the professor.
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The minute a man is convinced he is interesting, he isn't.
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The tears of childhood fall fast and easily, and evil be to him who makes them flow.
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What we call creative work, ought not to be called work at all, because it isn't. I imagine that Thomas Edison never did a day's work in his last fifty years.
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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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Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.
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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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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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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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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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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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About the only good thing you can say about old age is, it's better than being dead!
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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.
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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.
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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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You cannot depict love inside a frame of fact. It needs a mist to dissolve in.
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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 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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Chess is one long regret.
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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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