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If I have not seen as far as others, it is because there were giants standing on my shoulders.
-Harold Abelson
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Humor is a spontaneous, wonderful bit of an outburst that just comes. It's unbridled, its unplanned, it's full of suprises.
-Erma Bombeck
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Someone who makes you laugh is a comedian. Someone who makes you think and then laugh is a humorist.
-George Burns
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I have a suggestion that I think would help fight serious crime. Signs. There are lots of signs for minor infractions: No Smoking, Stay Off the Grass, Keep Out, and they seem to work fairly well. I think we should also have signs for major crimes: Murder Strictly Prohibited, NO Raping People, Thank You for Not Kidnapping Anyone. It's certainly worth a try. I'm convinced Watergate would never have happened if there had just been a sign in the Oval Office that said, Malfeasance of Office Is Strictly Against the Law, or Thank You for Not Undermining the Constitution.
-George Carlin
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"Humore is an affirmation of man's dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him."
-Romain Cary
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Great use they have, when in the hands
Of one like me, who understands,
Who understands the time and place,
The person, manner, and the grace,
Which fools neglect; so that we find,
If all the requisites are join'd,
From whence a perfect joke must spring,
A joke's a very serious thing.
-Charles Churchill, The Ghost (book IV, lines 1379-1387), 1762
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"Well, dinner would have been splendid…if the wine had been as cold as the soup, the beef as rare as the service, the brandy as old as the fish, and the maid as willing as the Duchess."
-Sir Winston Churchill
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You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything - even poverty - you can survive it.
-Bill Cosby
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The love of truth lies at the root of much humor.
-Robertson Davies
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"Humor is not a postscript or an incidental afterthought; it is a serious and weighty part of the world's economy. One feels increasingly the height of the faculty in which it arises, the nobility of things associated with it, and the greatness of services it renders."
-Oscar W. Firkins, Oscar Firkins: Memoirs and Letters
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"Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be."
-William Hazlitt
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I try to offset any tendency towards the macabre with humour. As I see it, this is a typically English form of humour. It's a piece with such jokes as the one about the man who was being led to the gallows to be hanged. He looked at the trap door in the gallows, which was flimsily constructed, and he asked in some alarm, 'I say, is that thing safe?'
-Alfred Hitchcock
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"An Irishman needs three things : silence, cunnning, and exile."
-James Joyce
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Be not affronted at a joke. If one throw salt at thee, thou wilt receive no harm, unless thou art raw.
-Junius
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"What makes you think the whole world revolves around you?!" my mother said, as I slowly rotated to maintain eye contact.
-John Alejandro King
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The problem with those bumper stickers that warn against tailgating, is that I have to get really close to the person's car to read them.
-John Alejandro King, The Covert Comic
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The man who said in 1899: "Everything that can be invented has been invented" - technically, wasn't he right at the time?
-John Alejandro King, The Covert Comic
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Remember, anyone can juggle for a second.
-John Alejandro King
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Humor may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life, and the artistic expression thereof.
-Stephen Leacock
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But the deep background that lies behind and beyond what we call humor is revealed only to the few who, by instinct or by effort, have given thought to it. The world's humor, in its best and greatest sense, is perhaps the highest product of our civilization. Its basis lies in the deeper contrasts offered by life itself: the strange incongruity between our aspiration and our achievement, the eager and fretful anxieties of today that fade into nothingness tomorrow, the burning pain and the sharp sorrow that are softened in the gentle retrospect of time, till as we look back upon the course that has been traversed, we pass in view the panorama of our lives, as people in old age may recall, with mingled tears and smiles, the angry quarrels of their childhood. And here, in its larger aspect, humor is blended with pathos till the two are one, and represent, as they have in every age, the mingled heritage of tears and laughter that is our lot on earth.
-Stephen Leacock
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Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? All the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewelry.
-John Lennon, Royal Variety Performance, London, quoted in John Winston Lennon, pt. 1, ch. 11, R. Colman (1984)
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"Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs."
-Christopher Morley, Inward Ho
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"Wit is the lowest form of humor."
-Alexander Pope, "Essay on Criticism"
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"Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals."
-Agnes Repplier, Points of View
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Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
-James Thurber
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Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.
-Mark Twain, Following the Equator-A Journey Around the World, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar"
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Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he isn't. A sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is.
-Horace Walpole
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A well-developed sense of humor is the pole that adds balance to your step as you walk the tightrope of life.
-William Arthur Ward
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Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White, Some Remarks on Humor (introduction)
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This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought.
-Lin Yutang
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Books about Humor
