143 Quotes by Stephen Leacock

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

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

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

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

If I were founding a university I would begin with a smoking room; next a dormitory; and then a decent reading room and a library. After that, if I still had more money that I couldn’t use, I would hire a professor and get some text books.

Most people can tire of a lecture in fifteen minutes, clever people can do it in five, and sensible people don’t go to lectures at all.

The classical scholars have kept alive the tradition of the superiority of the ancient languages – a kaleidoscopic mass of suffixes and prefixes, supposed to represent an infinite shading of meaning. It is a character they share with the Ojibway and the Zulu.

Modern critics, who refuse to let a plain thing alone, have now started a theory that Cervantes’s work is a vast piece of “symbolism.” If so, Cervantes didn’t know it himself and nobody thought of it for three hundred years. He meant it as a satire upon the silly romances of chivalry.

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.