Stephen Leacock Quotes

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

  Stephen Leacock

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• 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

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• 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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• 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

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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.’

  Stephen Leacock

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

  Stephen Leacock

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• 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

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• 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

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

  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 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

• Advertising: the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.

  Stephen Leacock

  Topics in Intelligence

  Tags in Adversity

• Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.

  Stephen Leacock

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Personally, Would, Imagination, Writing

• On the same bill and on the same side of it there should not be two charges for the same thing.

  Stephen Leacock

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Same Side, Charge

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Horses, Courage, Cent

• 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

• 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

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 - 31st May

Births

• 1962 - Larry Bucshon
• 1967 - Phil Keoghan
• 1939 - Terry Waite
• 1943 - Al From
• 1961 - Lea Thompson

Deaths

• 1962 - Adolf Eichmann
• 1981 - Barbara Ward
• 1970 - Terry Sawchuk
• 2004 - Robert Quine
• 1847 - Thomas Chalmers