Stephen Leacock Quotes

I think Latin has some logic to it and there was a discipline.

My father made me take three years of Latin in high school.

The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of the highway, as a lake of a river.... The word is from the Latin villa, which together with via, a way, or more anciently ved and vella, Varro derives from veho, to carry, because the villa is the place to and from which things are carried.... Hence, too, the Latin word vilis and our vile, also villain. This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that goes by and over them, without traveling themselves.

I received an honorary doctorate for my work. Maybe one of these works is considered the equivalent of a Ph.D.

As an Englishman, permit me now to say with what pleasure I learnt of the election of Professor Planck and Professor Stark to the Nobel Prizes for the years 1918 and 1919.

I didn't get my degree at NYU; I got it later, they gave me an honourary one.

Believe it or not, I was just given an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Tennessee.

There is, however, another purpose to which academies contribute. When they consist of a limited number of persons, eminent for their knowledge, it becomes an object of ambition to be admitted on their list.

The first award that I recall having received was in the form of a scholarship when I was studying in the 5th standard. I was granted this scholarship for achieving academic excellence, and it continues to be one of the high points in my life.

I've got some gift for languages. You follow your gift. But Latin's not easy.

'Concierge' comes from the Latin for 'slave.'

I was lucky to get to Oxford. I am now an honorary fellow of my old college, which is nice, particularly for a colonial like me.

Latin is an international language.

Bizarrely, our English word 'sturdy' may go back to the Latin turdus, thrush. Anyone described as 'sturdy' in the 1200s was wilfully reckless and possibly as immovable as a sozzled bird.

My daughter was never offered 'Student Of The Year 2.'

Unicorn. Old French, unicorne. Latin, unicornis. Literally, one-horned: unus, one and cornu,a horn. A fabulous animal resembling a horse with one horn.

The word 'radical' derives from the Latin word for root. Therefore, if you want to get to the root of anything you must be radical. It is no accident that the word has now been totally demonized.

I still consider myself to be an amateur filmmaker. And I say that because in the Latin origin of the word amateur is the word love, and it's love of a form, whereas professional implies something you do for money or for work.

What? Corpus. Body. Corpse. Good idea the Latin. Stupifies them first. Hospice for the dying. They don't seem to chew it; only swallow it down.

Oh, you're in television! That's interesting. No, I mean, the word television is interesting. It's a hybrid, you see: tele- comes from the greek, and -vision comes from the latin. It should have been either "telerama", or "procolvision".

The word "religion" beautifully defines itself, of course. It translates "to bind" from the Latin--"re" means back and "ligare" means to tie up. All religions are straightjackets, jackets for the straight.

Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise; a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.

Going back into the history of a word, very often into Latin, we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done. These models may be fairly sophisticated and recent, as is perhaps the case with 'motive' or 'impulse', but one of the commonest and most primitive types of model is one which is apt to baffle us through its very naturalness and simplicity.

Every real nation is a people of a common blood and descended from the same ancestors. A nation - from the Latin word meaning to be born - can have no other meaning.

Science is only a Latin word for knowledge