Stephen Leacock
55 quotes
Biography
Stephen Butler Leacock was a Canadian teacher, political scientist, writer, and humourist. From 1915 to 1925, he was the best-known English-speaking humourist in the world.
"Lord Ronald said nothing; he flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions."
"Special Correspondence. I learn from a very high authority, whose name I am not at liberty to mention, (speaking to me at a place which I am not allowed to indicate and in a language which I am forbidden to use)—that Austria-Hungary is about to take a diplomatic step of the highest importance. What this step is, I am forbidden to say. But the consequences of it—which unfortunately I am pledged not to disclose—will be such as to effect results which I am not free to enumerate."
"Americans are queer people: they can't rest."
"The Lord said "Let there be wheat" and Saskatchewan was born."
"With the thermometer at 30 below zero and the wind behind him, a man walking on Main Street in Winnipeg knows which side of him is which."
"It is to be observed that "angling" is the name given to fishing by people who can't fish."
"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."
"I detest life-insurance agents: they always argue that I shall some day die, which is not so."
"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."
"The rushing of his spirit from its prison-house was as rapid as a hunted cat passing over a garden fence."
"You know, many a man realizes late in life that if when he was a boy he had known what he knows now, instead of being what he is he might be what he won't; but how few boys stop to think that if they knew what they don't know instead of being what they will be, they wouldn't be?"
"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."
"A barber is by nature and inclination a sport. He can tell you at what exact hour the ball game is to begin, can foretell its issue without losing a stroke of the razor, and can explain the points of inferiority of all the players, as compared with the better men that he has personally seen elsewhere, with the nicety of a professional."
"Many of my friends are under the impression that I write these humorous nothings in idle moments when the wearied brain is unable to perform the serious labours of the economist. My own experience is exactly the other way. The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far between. Personally, I would sooner have written "Alice in Wonderland" than the whole Encyclopaedia Britannica."
"My parents migrated to Canada in 1876, and I decided to go with them."
"Of course, Pupkin would never have thought of considering himself on an intellectual par with Mallory Tompkins. That would have been ridiculous. Mallory Tompkins had read all sorts of things and had half a mind to write a novel himself—either that or a play. All he needed, he said, was to have a chance to get away somewhere by himself and think. Every time he went away to the city Pupkin expected that he might return with the novel all finished; but though he often came back with his eyes red from thinking, the novel as yet remained incomplete."
"I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it."
"Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl."
"It's called political economy because it is has nothing to do with either politics or economy."
"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."
"A half truth, like half a brick, is always more forcible as an argument than a whole one. It carries better."
"A half truth, like half a brick, is always more forcible as an argument than a whole one. It carries better."
"I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it."
"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."
"Life we learn too late is in the living in the tissue of every day and hour."