Stephen Leacock

“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.”

“Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.”

“Astronomy teaches the correct use of the sun and the planets.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“A sportsman is a man who every now and then, simply has to get out and kill something.”

“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.”

“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 landlady of a boarding-house is a parallelogram - that is, an oblong angular figure, which cannot be described, but which is equal to anything.”

“It's a lie, but Heaven will forgive you for it.”

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

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

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

“The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far in between. Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.”

“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.”

“Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.”

“I detest life-insurance agents: they always argue that I shall some day die, which is not so.”