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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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Stephen Leacock
Age: 74 †
Born: 1869
Born: December 30
Died: 1944
Died: March 28
Economist
Humorist
Political Scientist
Writer
Hants
Stephen Butler Leacock
Wonder
Miracles
Literature
Statistics
Lying
Primitive
Exaggerations
Times
Giants
Exaggeration
Fall
Size
Wonders
Science
Miracle
Counts
Back
Lies
Hence
Huge
Earlier

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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 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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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.
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Men are able to trust one another, knowing the exact degree of dishonesty they are entitled to expect.
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Chess is one long regret.
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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.
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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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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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My parents migrated to Canada in 1876, and I decided to go with them.
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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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Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.
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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.
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I admit that when the facts are not good enough, I always exaggerate them.
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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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The tears of childhood fall fast and easily, and evil be to him who makes them flow.
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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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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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It may be those who do most, dream most.
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