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The Victorians needed parody. Without it their literature would have been a rank and weedy growth, over-watered with tears.

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
Growth
Needed
Literature
Weedy
Without
Victorians
Would
Watered
Parody
Rank
Tears

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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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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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The sorrows and disasters of Europe always brought fortune to America.
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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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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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Being a specialist is one thing, getting a job is another.
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Each section of the British Isles has its own way of laughing, except Wales, which doesn't.
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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.
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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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You can never have international peace as long as you have national poverty.
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My parents migrated to Canada in 1876, and I decided to go with them.
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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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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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Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.
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There is an old motto that runs, If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. This is nonsense. It ought to read, If at first you don't succeed, quit, quit at once.
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All our yesterdays, it is true, have only lighted fools the way to dusty death. But we need at least the dates of the yesterdays and the list of the fools.
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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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You cannot depict love inside a frame of fact. It needs a mist to dissolve in.
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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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