Václav Havel on laughter

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

If you want to see your plays performed the way you wrote them, become President.

There used to be a time when this country’s president could have delivered the same New Year’s Address he had given a year before, and nobody would have noticed.
Fortunately, that time has passed.

Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.

Mark Twain1835–1910“The Chronicle of Young Satan” (ca. 1897–1900, unfinished), published posthumously in Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (1969), ed. William Merriam Gibson (pp. 165–166 in the 2005 paperback printing, )

Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.

Victor Hugo1802–1885

You can’t deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.

Stephen Kingborn 1947