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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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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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When actors begin to think, it's time for a change. They are not fitted for it.
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Advertising: the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.
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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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I've seen lifelong friends drift apart over golf just because one could play better, but the other counted better.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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The Victorians needed parody. Without it their literature would have been a rank and weedy growth, over-watered with tears.
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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.
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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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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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Men are able to trust one another, knowing the exact degree of dishonesty they are entitled to expect.
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You can never have international peace as long as you have national poverty.
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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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Chess is one long regret.
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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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My parents migrated to Canada in 1876, and I decided to go with them.
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