143 Quotes by Stephen Leacock

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.

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.”

The minute a man is convinced he is interesting, he isn’t.

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

I’ve seen lifelong friends drift apart over golf just because one could play better, but the other counted better.

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.

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

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.

Pupkin shifted his opinions like the glass in a kaleidoscope.