Stephen Leacock Quotes

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

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

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

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself – it is the occurring which is difficult.

A half truth, like half a brick, is always more forcible as an argument than a whole one. It carries better.

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

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.

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

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

Advertising: the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.

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.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

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

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

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.

If every day in the life of a school could be the last day but one, there would be little fault to find with it.

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

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.

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

It may be those who do most, dream most.