Stephen Leacock Quotes

Never a man to understate matters

Hyperbole was to Lyndon Johnson what oxygen is to life.

I think writers are prone to hyperbole sometimes.

False eloquence is exaggeration; true eloquence is emphasis.

Hyperbole is something I'd better avoid.

He who cannot exaggerate is not qualified to utter truth.

I was always looking for the most dramatic emphasis.

I live in a constant state of hyperbole.

The speaking in perpetual hyperbole is comely in nothing but love.

Accent [emphasis] is the soul of speech; it gives it feeling and truth.

Hyperbole engaged in consciously to achieve a desired effect can be, as we have noted, a useful rhetorical tool. Indeed, its use in this manner is sometimes called "exaggeration in the service of truth." However, there's much to be said for restraint of tongue and pen, and restraint refers not only to what we say but also to how we say it. It is possible, believe it or not, to be emphatic without indulging in overstatement; it is possible to be forceful without exaggerating.

Americans like to add the word 'super' when they're describing things.

An orator of past times declared that his calling was to make small things appear to be grand.

You know what's the greatest part of anything ever in the history of everything? Exaggeration. No, wait; it's correcting yourself. No, better yet, it's making lists.

Exaggeration! was ever any virtue attributed to a man without exaggeration? was ever any vice, without infinite exaggeration? Do we not exaggerate ourselves to ourselves, or do we recognize ourselves for the actual men we are? Are we not all great men? Yet what are we actually, to speak of? We live by exaggeration.

As a matter of fact is an expression that precedes many an expression that isn't.

Inflated descriptions by the pen or exaggerated illustrations by the pencil.

I'm more of an exaggerator than a liar.

Exaggeration is truth that has lost its temper.

The point—the power to hurt—of all figures [of speech] consist in the truthfulness of their application.

Amplification is the vice of modern oratory.

We need to become more acutely conscious that words matter. None of us would deny that ideas and opinions matter, but we can sometimes be careless about how we express them. The words we choose to advance an idea, opinion, or point of view have a huge impact on how people react and respond to that view. When we use hyperbole, we increase the chances of being misunderstood and of promoting equally exaggerated counter-reactions, especially when people are reacting almost instantaneously.

An orator is a man who says what he thinks and feels what he says.

For [Donald] Trump, popularity equals truth... He understands that in American public discourse, it's hard to say the people are wrong.

When one emphasizes, as Jacques Derrida once remarked, one always overemphasizes.