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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.

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
Right
English
Conversation
Scotch
Literature
Sermons
American
Languages
Language
Spoken
Use
Canada
Two
Keeping
Enough
Ahead

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You can never have international peace as long as you have national poverty.
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American politicians do anything for money... English politicians take the money and won't do anything.
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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.
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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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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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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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Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.
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My parents migrated to Canada in 1876, and I decided to go with 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.
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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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Chess is one long regret.
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Presently I shall be introduced as 'this venerable old gentleman' and the axe will fall when they raise me to the degree of 'grand old man'. That means on our continent any one with snow-white hair who has kept out of jail till eighty.
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Indeed I have always found that the only thing in regard to Toronto which faraway people know for certain is that McGill University is in 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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Humour in its highest reach mingles with pathos: it voices sorrow for our human lot and reconciliation with it.
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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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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.
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You cannot depict love inside a frame of fact. It needs a mist to dissolve in.
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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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