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American politicians do anything for money... English politicians take the money and won't do anything.

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
Money
Anything
Take
Politicians
English
Politician
American

More quotes by Stephen Leacock

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You can never have international peace as long as you have national poverty.
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.
Stephen Leacock
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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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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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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
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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.
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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The Victorians needed parody. Without it their literature would have been a rank and weedy growth, over-watered with tears.
Stephen Leacock
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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.
Stephen Leacock
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The tears of childhood fall fast and easily, and evil be to him who makes them flow.
Stephen Leacock
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There is no doubt that many things in life come to us...at backrounds so to speak. Happiness is one of them.
Stephen Leacock
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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
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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
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In ancient times they had no statistics so they had to fall back on lies.
Stephen Leacock
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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.
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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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
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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.
Stephen Leacock
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It takes a good deal of physical courage to ride a horse. This, however, I have. I get it at about forty cents a flask, and take it as required.
Stephen Leacock
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Being a specialist is one thing, getting a job is another.
Stephen Leacock