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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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It is difficult to be funny and great at the same time. Aristophanes and Moliere and Mark Twain must sit below Aristotle and Bossuet and Emerson.
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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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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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The sorrows and disasters of Europe always brought fortune to America.
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I admit that when the facts are not good enough, I always exaggerate them.
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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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Advertising: the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.
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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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A lone maple leaf resting on sand Have you ever been out for a late autumn walk in the closing part of the afternoon, and suddenly looked up to realize that the leaves have practically all gone? And the sun has set and the day gone before you knew it, and with that a cold wind blows across the landscape? That's retirement.
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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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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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Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.
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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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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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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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In ancient times they had no statistics so they had to fall back on lies.
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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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Being a specialist is one thing, getting a job is another.
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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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