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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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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.
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You frequently ask, where are the friends of your childhood, and urge that they shall be brought back to you. As far as I am able to learn, those of your friends who are not in jail are still right there in your native village. You point out that they were wont to share your gambols, If so, you are certainly entitled to have theirs now.
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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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I admit that when the facts are not good enough, I always exaggerate them.
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You can never have international peace as long as you have national poverty.
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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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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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If every day in the life of a school could be the last day but one, there would be little fault to find with it.
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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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It may be those who do most, dream most.
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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.
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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.
Stephen Leacock
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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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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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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
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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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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.
Stephen Leacock
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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 am what is called a professor emeritus—from the Latin e, 'out,' and meritus, 'so he ought to be.
Stephen Leacock