Wit penetrates; humor envelops. Wit is a function of verbal intelligence; humor is imagination operating on good nature. John Kennedy had wit, and so did Lincoln, who also had abundant humor; Reagan was mostly humor.
--
What I Saw at the Revolution : A Political Life in the Reagan Era (1990), p. 179Peggy Noonan
He was a master of humor. He believed that humor is the test of the natural, of the sensible, of the truth. To him most persons who have no sense of humor are generally absurd.
Epifanio de los Santos
Humor is a marvelous communications tool, as Reagan has demonstrated so well. He has weathered many a storm that others might not have. With Reagan, people just say, 'There he goes again.' A sense of humor allows a president to back off a little from the tensions of the moment and take a calmer view of things.
Robert Orben
Humor is properly the exponent of low things; that which first renders them poetical to the mind. The man of Humor sees common life, even mean life, under the new light of sportfulness and love ; whatever has existence has a charm for him. Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius. He who wants it, be his other gifts what they may, has only half a mind; an eye for what is above him, not for what is about him or below him. Now, among all writers of any real poetic genius, we cannot recollect one who, in this respect, exhibits such total deficiency as [[Friedrich Schiller}Schiller]]. In his whole writings there is scarcely any vestige of it, scarcely any attempt that way. His nature was without Humor; and he had too true a feeling to adopt any counterfeit in its stead. Thus no drollery or caricature, still less any barren mockery, which, in the hundred cases are all that we find passing current as Humor, discover themselves in Schiller. His works are full of labored earnestness; he is the gravest of all writers.
Thomas Carlyle
The American public highly overrates its sense of humor. We're great belly laughers and prat fallers, but we never really did have a real sense of humor. Not satire anyway. We're a fatheaded, cotton-picking society. When we realize finally that we aren't God's given children, we'll understand satire. Humor is really laughing off a hurt, grinning at misery.
Bill Mauldin
Without humor, a sports fan is a religious fanatic. Without humor, a newscast is a terrible, depressing, unpalatable thing.
Keith Olbermann
Noonan, Peggy
Noory, George
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