“Without its assiduity to the ridiculous, would the human race have lasted more than a single generation?”

Vol. I, Ch. 1, Section 2, pg. 49.
(Buch I) (1867)

Source: On the Way to the Wedding

Source: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

21 September 1747
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

In the House of Commons, (26 January 1949)
Post-war years (1945–1955)
Source: Winston S. Churchill, Churchill in His Own Words, ed. Richard M. Langworth (London: Ebury, 2012), 148; and James, His Complete Speeches vol. 8, 7774.

Highway of Eternity (1986)
Context: Perversity, she thought. Could that have been what happened to the human race — a willing perversity that set at naught all human values which had been so hardly won and structured in the light of reason for a span of more than a million years? Could the human race, quite out of hand and with no sufficient reason, have turned its back upon everything that had built humanity? Or was it, perhaps, no more than second childhood, a shifting of the burden off one's shoulders and going back to the selfishness of the child who romped and frolicked without thought of consequence or liability?

Quoted in Comedian Flip Wilson Dies at 64 (November 26,1998) http://www.bobbydarin.net/aparticle.html

Of Boldness
Essays (1625)