"The personal comparative is marked by epigrammatic self-satire. It implies that everyone thinks himself better than anyone else, but only the egoist says so."

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More by Evan Esar

“An alert copyreader on a newspaper couldn’t believe it when he read a reporter’s account of the theft of 2025 pigs. That’s a lot of pigs, he thought, and called the farmer to check the copy. “Is it true that you lost 2025 pigs?” he asked. “Yeth,” lisped the farmer. “Thanks,” returned the copyreader, and corrected the story to read “two sows and 25 pigs.”

“Play: Work that you enjoy doing for nothing.”

“Many a man who falls in love with a dimple make the mistake of marrying the whole girl.”

“Zoo: An excellent place to study the habits of human beings.”

“The history of humorous writing discloses everchanging trends. Our fast-paced modern living is too impatient for the lengthy light verse and the leisurely essays of our forefathers.”

“An epigram is the marriage of wit, and wisdom; a wisecrack, their divorce.”

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"We often take for granted the terms, the premises, and the methods that prevail in our time and place. We take for granted, as the starting points for our own thinking, the outcomes of a process of th…"

— Harvey Flaumenhaft

Science1938

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"Thinking is easy," said Goethe, "acting is difficult, and to put one's thought into action is the most difficult thing in the world." And Tolstoy: "It is easier to produce ten volumes of philosophical…"

— André Maurois

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"Now what are we looking at right here? What’s bang in the middle? Some people think that’s mathematics there. Fine. But if maths is the study that best allows you to think your way to the centre, what…"

— China Miéville

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