Henry Ward Beecher

"A sense of humor is a major defense against minor troubles."

Mignon McLaughlin

"A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke - and that the joke is oneself."

Clifton Paul Fadiman

"A sense of humor... is needed armor. Joy in one's heart and some laughter on one's lips is a sign that the person down deep has a pretty good grasp of life."

Hugh Sidey

"A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself."

Jessamyn West

"A well-developed sense of humor is the pole that adds balance to your steps as you walk the tightrope of life."

William A. Ward

"Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it."

E. B. White

"Comedy has to be based on truth. You take the truth and you put a little curlicue at the end."

Sid Caesar

"Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious."

Peter Ustinov

"Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing."

William James

"Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven."

Mark Twain

"Great men are rarely isolated mountain peaks; they are the summits of ranges."

Thomas W. Higginson

"Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding."

Agnes Repplier

"Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals."

Agnes Repplier

"Humor is an affirmation of man's dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him."

Romain Cary

"Humor is just another defense against the universe."

Mel Brooks

"Humor is mankind's greatest blessing."

Mark Twain

"Humor is merely tragedy standing on its head with its pants torn."

Irvin S. Cobb

"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

"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

"Humor is reason gone mad."

Groucho Marx

"Humor is richly rewarding to the person who employs it. It has some value in gaining and holding attention, but it has no persuasive value at all."

John Kenneth Galbraith

"Humor is something that thrives between man's aspirations and his limitations. There is more logic in humor than in anything else. Because, you see, humor is truth."

Victor Borge

"Humor is the affectionate communication of insight."

Leo Rosten

"Humor is the instinct for taking pain playfully."

Max Eastman