A friend is a man who has the same enemies you have.
--Stephen Leacock
A sportsman is a man who, every now and then, simply has to go out and kill something.
--Stephen Leacock
Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.
--Stephen Leacock
Anybody can start a movement by beginning with himself.
--Stephen Leacock
Anybody who has listened to certain kinds of music, or read certain kinds of poetry, or heard certain kinds of performances on the concertina, will admit that even suicide has its brighter aspects.
--Stephen Leacock
By conscientious smoking and drinking they had kept themselves from the horror of thinking.
--Stephen Leacock
Death, you know, to the clergy, is a different thing from what it is to us.
--Stephen Leacock
Each of us in life is a prisoner. The past offers us, as it were a door of escape. We are set and bound in our confined lot. Outside, somewhere, is eternity; outside, somewhere, is infinity. We seek to reach into it and the pictured past seems to afford to us an outlet of escape.
--Stephen Leacock
Eternal punishment should be reserved for the mortgagees and bondholders.
--Stephen Leacock
Golf may be played on Sunday, not being a game within the view of the law, but being a form of moral effort.
--Stephen Leacock
Good jests ought to bite like lambs, not dogs: they should cut, not wound.
--Stephen Leacock
He had grasped as but few men have done the great truth that nothing really matters very much.
--Stephen Leacock
Higher education in America flourished chiefly as a qualification for entrance into a moneymaking profession, and not as a thing in itself.
--Stephen Leacock
Humor in a world of waning beliefs remains like Hope still left at the bottom of Pandora's box when all the evils of the Gods flew out from it upon the world.
--Stephen Leacock
Humor may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life, and the artistic expression thereof.
--Stephen Leacock
I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.
--Stephen Leacock
I detest life-insurance agents: they always argue that I shall someday die, which is not so.
--Stephen Leacock
I have always found that the only kind of statement worth making is an overstatement. A half truth, like half a brick, is always more forcible as an argument than a whole one. It carries better.
--Stephen Leacock
I would sooner have written 'Alice in Wonderland' than the whole Encyclopaedia Britannica.
--Stephen Leacock
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.
--Stephen Leacock
In art one must judge a man by his best, never by his worst; by his highest reach, not by his lowest fall.
--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.
--Stephen Leacock
It is the times that have changed, not the man. He is there still, just as greedy and rapacious as ever, but no greedier: and we have just the same social need of his greed as a motive power in industry as we ever had, and indeed a worse need than before.
--Stephen Leacock
It is the wishes and likings of the mass which largely dictate what the rest of us shall see and hear.
--Stephen Leacock
It is to be observed that 'angling' is the name given to fishing by people who can't fish.
--Stephen Leacock
It may be those who do most, dream most.
--Stephen Leacock
Laughter is the last refuge of sorrow.
--Stephen Leacock
Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.
--Stephen Leacock
Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl.
--Stephen Leacock
Men are able to trust one another, knowing the exact degree of dishonesty they are entitled to expect.
--Stephen Leacock
One-sided love lasts best.
--Stephen Leacock
People who have never married have not really lived. People who have married and had no children have only half-lived. People who have one child only are a long way from the crown of human life.
--Stephen Leacock
Scholars who love minutiae deny everything.
--Stephen Leacock
Silence, if deliberate, is artificial and irritating; but silence that is unconscious gives human companionship without human boredom.
--Stephen Leacock
The chief immediate direction of social effort should be towards the attempt to give to every human being in childhood adequate food, clothing, education, and an opportunity in life. This will prove to be the beginning of many things.
--Stephen Leacock
The landlady of a boarding-house is a parallelogram- that is, an oblong figure, which cannot be described, but which is equal to anything.
--Stephen Leacock
The Lord said 'Let there be wheat' and Saskatchewan was born.
--Stephen Leacock
The minute a man is convinced that he is interesting, he isn't.
--Stephen Leacock
The obligation to die must carry with it the right to live. If every citizen owes it to society that he must fight for it in case of need, then society owes to every citizen the opportunity of a livelihood. 'Unemployment,' in the case of the willing and able becomes henceforth a social crime. Every democratic Government must henceforth take as the starting point of its industrial policy, that there shall be no such thing as able bodied men and women 'out of work,' looking for occupation and unable to find it.
--Stephen Leacock
The real thing for the student is the life and environment that surrounds him. All that he really learns he learns, in a sense, by the active operation of his own intellect and not as the passive recipient of lectures.
--Stephen Leacock
The world's humor, in its best and greatest sense, is perhaps the highest product of our civilization.
--Stephen Leacock
There are two things in ordinary conversation which ordinary people dislike- information and wit.
--Stephen Leacock
There is no man living who can overcome the ingrained prejudice of social disadvantages.
--Stephen Leacock
To few it has been given to see things as they are, to know that no opinion is altogether right, no purpose altogether laudable, and no calamity altogether deplorable.
--Stephen Leacock
Try to buy happiness, by the quart or by the yard, and you never find it. Motion it away from you while you turn to Duty and you will find it waiting beside your chair.
--Stephen Leacock
We're so much alike that we can't discuss. We can only fight.
--Stephen Leacock
When we in touch with heathens come
We send them first a case of rum
Next, to rebuke their native sin
We send a missionary in.
--Stephen Leacock
With perfect citizens any Government is good.
--Stephen Leacock
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.
--Stephen Leacock
Work must either be found or must be provided by the State itself. It grows upon what it feeds on. Each time a worker is thrown out of employment, there is a loss of purchasing power; with each loss of purchasing power, another man is thrown out of work. There is no end, no stop.
--Stephen Leacock
You can never have international peace as long as you have national poverty.
--Stephen Leacock
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?
--Stephen Leacock
Found 52 occurence(s) in 52,568 quotation(s).