Talk: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.

[this one is from "Homer and Humbug" http://www.online-literature.com/stephen-leacock/behind-the-beyond/6/ somebody else edit it in i'm too lazy ]

• A sportsman is a man who every now and then, simply has to get out and kill something.

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

• Astronomy teaches the correct use of the sun and the planets.

• Each section of the British Isles has its own way of laughing, except Wales, which doesn't.

• Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference is, I presume, that one comes a little more expensive, but is more durable; the other is a cheaper thing, but the moths get into it.

• I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.

• In ancient times they had no statistics so they had to fall back on lies.

• It is to be observed that 'angling' is the name given to fishing by people who can't fish.

• It may be those who do most, dream most.

• 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.

• It's a lie, but Heaven will forgive you for it.

• It's called political economy because it is has nothing to do with either politics or economy.

• Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.

• Many a man in love with a dimple makes a mistake of marrying the whole girl.

• Men are able to trust one another, knowing the exact degree of dishonesty they are entitled to expect.

• Newspapermen learn to call a murderer "an alleged murderer" and the King of England "the alleged King of England" to avoid libel suits.

• 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.

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

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

• Synopsis of Previous Chapters: There are no Previous Chapters.

• The Compleat Angler is acknowledged to be one of the world's books. Only the trouble is that the world doesn't read its books, it borrows a detective story instead.

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

• 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.

• 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.'

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

• We think of the noble object for which the professor appears to-night, we may be assured that the Lord will forgive any one who will laugh at the professor.

• 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.

• I throw ink at the wolf, to keep it from the door.