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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
Rank
Tears
Growth
Needed
Literature
Weedy
Without
Victorians
Would
Watered
Parody

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Anybody who has listened to certain kinds of music, or read certain kinds of poetry, or heard certain kinds of performances on the concertina, will admit that even suicide has its brighter aspects.
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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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About the only good thing you can say about old age is, it's better than being dead!
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Humour in its highest reach mingles with pathos: it voices sorrow for our human lot and reconciliation with it.
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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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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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Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.
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Chess is one long regret.
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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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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 sorrows and disasters of Europe always brought fortune to America.
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You cannot depict love inside a frame of fact. It needs a mist to dissolve in.
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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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In ancient times they had no statistics so they had to fall back on lies.
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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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American politicians do anything for money... English politicians take the money and won't do anything.
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Being a specialist is one thing, getting a job is another.
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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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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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The landlady of a boarding-house is a parallelogram - that is, an oblong angular figure, which cannot be described, but which is equal to anything
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