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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
Without
Victorians
Would
Watered
Parody
Rank
Tears
Growth
Needed
Literature
Weedy
More quotes by Stephen Leacock
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
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.
Stephen Leacock
Humour is essentially a comforter, reconciling us to things as they are in contrast to things as they might be.
Stephen Leacock
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.
Stephen Leacock
Golf may be played on Sunday, not being a game within the view of the law, but being a form of moral effort.
Stephen Leacock
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
The sorrows and disasters of Europe always brought fortune to America.
Stephen Leacock
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.
Stephen Leacock
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.
Stephen Leacock
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
I admit that when the facts are not good enough, I always exaggerate them.
Stephen Leacock
You can never have international peace as long as you have national poverty.
Stephen Leacock
Humour in its highest reach mingles with pathos: it voices sorrow for our human lot and reconciliation with it.
Stephen Leacock
Each section of the British Isles has its own way of laughing, except Wales, which doesn't.
Stephen Leacock
It may be those who do most, dream most.
Stephen Leacock
The tears of childhood fall fast and easily, and evil be to him who makes them flow.
Stephen Leacock
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.
Stephen Leacock
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.
Stephen Leacock
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
American politicians do anything for money... English politicians take the money and won't do anything.
Stephen Leacock
