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Humour is essentially a comforter, reconciling us to things as they are in contrast to things as they might be.

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
Reconciling
Comforter
Humour
Contrast
Essentially
Might
Things

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Chess is one long regret.
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American politicians do anything for money... English politicians take the money and won't do anything.
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In ancient times they had no statistics so they had to fall back on lies.
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I am what is called a professor emeritus—from the Latin e, 'out,' and meritus, 'so he ought to be.
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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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I admit that when the facts are not good enough, I always exaggerate them.
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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.
Stephen Leacock
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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.
Stephen Leacock
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Most people tire of a lecture in ten minutes clever people can do it in five. Sensible people never go to lectures at all. But the people who do go to a lecture and who get tired of it, presently hold it as a sort of grudge against the lecturer personally. In reality his sufferings are worse than theirs.
Stephen Leacock
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Being a specialist is one thing, getting a job is another.
Stephen Leacock
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The minute a man is convinced he is interesting, he isn't.
Stephen Leacock
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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.
Stephen Leacock
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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
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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.
Stephen Leacock
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The sorrows and disasters of Europe always brought fortune to America.
Stephen Leacock
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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.
Stephen Leacock
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Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.
Stephen Leacock
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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.
Stephen Leacock
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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.
Stephen Leacock
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Humor may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life, and the artistic expression thereof.
Stephen Leacock