Stephen Leacock Quotes

• I have a suspicion it’s inevitable, but give me my stick. I’ll face it.

  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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• I am what is called a professor emeritus—from the Latin e, ‘out’, and meritus, ‘so he ought to be’.

  Stephen Leacock

  Topics in Uncategorized

• The general idea, of course, in any first-class laundry, is to see that no shirt or collar ever comes back twice.

  Stephen Leacock

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• Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it.

  Stephen Leacock

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• A decision of the courts decided that the game of golf may be played on a Sunday, not being a game within the view of the law, but being a form of moral effort.

  Stephen Leacock

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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.’

  Stephen Leacock

  Topics in Uncategorized

• His life was one round of activity which he himself might deplore but was powerless to prevent.

  Stephen Leacock

  Topics in Uncategorized

• When you meet Mr. Smith first you think he looks like an over-dressed pirate. Then you begin to think him a character. You wonder at his enormous bulk. Then the utter hopelessness of knowing what Smith is thinking by merely looking at his features gets on your mind and makes the Mona Lisa seem an open book and the ordinary human countenance as superficial as a puddle in the sunlight.

  Stephen Leacock

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Get your room full of good air, then shut up the windows and keep it. It will keep for years. Anyway, don’t keep using your lungs all the time. Let them rest.

  Stephen Leacock

  Topics in Uncategorized

• I detest life-insurance agents; they always argue that I shall some day die, which is not so.

  Stephen Leacock

  Topics in Uncategorized

• The great man…walks across his century and leaves the marks of his feet all over it, ripping out the dates on his galoshes as he passes.

  Stephen Leacock

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• There are no handles to a horse, but the 1910 model has a string to each side of its face for turning its head when there is anything you want it to see.

  Stephen Leacock

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• Advertising – A judicious mixture of flattery and threats.

  Stephen Leacock

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  Tags in Humour

• 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

  Topics in Joy, Life, Work

  Tags in Creativity

• 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

  Tags in Professor, Assured

• There are two things in ordinary conversation which ordinary people dislike – information and wit.

  Stephen Leacock

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Wit, Ordinary, Dislike, Conversation

• The Lord said ‘let there be wheat’ and Saskatchewan was born.

  Stephen Leacock

  Tags in Wheat

• 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.

  Stephen Leacock

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Cocksure, Described, Angular, Equal

• The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

  Stephen Leacock

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Primitive, Reading, Literature, Book

Stephen Leacock (44)

Birth:	30th December, 1869
Death:	28th March, 1944
Nationality:	Canadian
Profession:	Humorist, Political Scientist, Teacher, Writer

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Today's Anniversary - 23rd April

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Deaths

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