pun quotes

   A man who could make so vile a pun would not scruple to pick a pocket.

-John Dennis
Of Dennis. In the Gentleman's Magazine 1781, editorial note.

The last breath I drew in he wished might be through a pipe and exhaled in a pun.

- Charles Lamb
Quoted in W  Toynbee Diaries of William Charles Macready 1833^1851 (1912).

Every poet knows the pun is Pierian, that it springs from the same soil as the Muse†a matching and shifting of vowels and consonants, an adroit assonance sometimes derided as jackassonance.

- Louis Untermeyer
  Bygones.