Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Stephen Leacock
Age: 74 †
Born: 1869
Born: December 30
Died: 1944
Died: March 28
Economist
Humorist
Political Scientist
Writer
Hants
Stephen Butler Leacock
Order
Murderer
Suits
Avoid
King
Kings
England
Newspapermen
Call
Alleged
Learn
Libel

More quotes by Stephen Leacock

Image
Humor may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life, and the artistic expression thereof.
Stephen Leacock
Image
You can never have international peace as long as you have national poverty.
Stephen Leacock
Image
Chess is one long regret.
Stephen Leacock
Image
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
Image
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
Image
You cannot depict love inside a frame of fact. It needs a mist to dissolve in.
Stephen Leacock
Image
The great man... walks across his century and leaves the marks of his feet all over it, ripping out the dates on his goloshes as he passes.
Stephen Leacock
Image
I admit that when the facts are not good enough, I always exaggerate them.
Stephen Leacock
Image
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
Image
Men are able to trust one another, knowing the exact degree of dishonesty they are entitled to expect.
Stephen Leacock
Image
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.
Stephen Leacock
Image
When actors begin to think, it's time for a change. They are not fitted for it.
Stephen Leacock
Image
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.
Stephen Leacock
Image
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.
Stephen Leacock
Image
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
Image
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.
Stephen Leacock
Image
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.
Stephen Leacock
Image
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.
Stephen Leacock
Image
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.
Stephen Leacock
Image
Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.
Stephen Leacock