Stephen Leacock
In the decade spanning 1915 to 1925, Stephen Leacock held the distinction of being the best-known English-speaking humourist in the world — a measure of reach that cut across national boundaries for a man who held citizenship in both Canada and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
Born on 30 December 1869 in Hampshire, Leacock was educated at Strathroy District Collegiate Institute, Upper Canada College, the University of Toronto, and the University of Chicago. He worked across several fields simultaneously, serving as a teacher, political scientist, economist, politician, writer, and short story writer, all while producing work in English that drew on his identity as a humorist. The breadth of his roles reflects a career that did not settle into a single discipline but moved between the academic, the political, and the literary throughout his working life.
Leacock received a number of formal recognitions during and after his career. He was awarded the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Canada, the Lorne Pierce Medal, and the Governor General's Award for English-language non-fiction. After his death in Toronto on 28 March 1944, he was designated a Person of National Historic Significance in Canada — a concrete acknowledgment by the Canadian state of his place in the country's cultural and intellectual record.
Quotes by Stephen Leacock
Stephen Leacock's insights on:
A sportsman is a man who, every now and then, simply has to get out and kill something. Not that he's cruel. He wouldn't hurt a fly. It's not big enough.
And beer rolled down the Tennessee and California Wine Was used as Blood for Hollywood.
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.'
Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.
A sportsman is a man who every now and then, simply has to get out and kill something.
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.
There are two things in ordinary conversation which ordinary people dislike - information and wit.
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.
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.