Quotes from Stephen Leacock

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

Golf may be played on Sunday, not being a game within the view of the law, but being a form of moral effort.

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

The attempt to make the consumption of beer criminal is as silly and as futile as if you passed a law to send a man to jail for eating cucumber salad.

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

The great man... walks across his century and leaves the marks of his feet all over it, ripping out the dates on his goloshes as he passes.

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.

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.

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.

I admit that when the facts are not good enough, I always exaggerate them.

Success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.

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

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

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

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

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

It may be those who do most, dream most.

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

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.

Humor may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life, and the artistic expression thereof.

There is no doubt that many things in life come to us...at backrounds so to speak. Happiness is one of them.

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

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.

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