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Adams, John • Bacon, Francis • Bible • Bierce, Ambrose • Billings, Josh • Butcher, Jim • Chesterton, Gilbert Keith • Churchill, Winston • Einstein, Albert • Eisenhower, Dwight David • Emerson, Ralph Waldo • Franklin, Benjamin • Fuller, Thomas (1654) • Gaiman, Neil • Galbraith, John Kenneth • Gandhi, Mohandas • Goethe, Johann von • Hazlitt, William • Heinlein, Robert A. • Hoffer, Eric • Huxley, Aldous • Ingersoll, Robert Green • James, William • Jefferson, Thomas • Johnson, Lyndon • Johnson, Samuel • Kennedy, John F. • King, Martin Luther • La Rochefoucauld, Francois • Lewis, C.S. • Lincoln, Abraham • Mencken, H.L. • Orwell, George • Pratchett, Terry • Roosevelt, Eleanor • Roosevelt, Theodore • Russell, Bertrand • Seneca the Younger • Shakespeare, William • Shaw, George Bernard • Stevenson, Adlai • Stevenson, Robert Louis • Twain, Mark • Watterson, Bill • Wilde, Oscar- Only the 45 most quoted authors are shown above. Full author list.
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Quotations by Rogers, Will
You know, Percy, everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.
The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has. Even when you make a tax form out on the level, you don’t know when it’s through if you are a crook or a martyr.
More men have been elected between Sundown and Sunup than were ever elected between Sunup and Sundown.
If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can’t it get us out?
I would rather be the man who bought the Brooklyn Bridge than the one who sold it.
The budget is a mythical bean bag. Congress votes mythical beans into it, and then tries to reach in and pull real beans out.
The road to success is dotted with many tempting parking spaces.
You can’t legislate intelligence and common sense into people.
Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for.
We can’t all be heroes because somebody has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by.
When the Judgment Day comes civilization will have an alibi, “I never took a human life, I only sold the fellow the gun to take it with.”
I never expected to see the day when girls would get sunburned in the places they do today.
This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.
The only time people dislike gossip is when you gossip about them.
There’s no credit to being a comedian, when you have the whole Government working for you. All you have to do is report the facts. I don’t even have to exaggerate.
People who fly into a rage always make a bad landing.
If you want to know when a war might be coming, you just watch the U.S. and see when it starts cutting down on its defenses. It’s the surest barometer in the world.
Call me a “rube” and a “hick,” but I’d a lot rather be the man who bought the Brooklyn Bridge than the man who sold it.
Diplomacy is the art of saying, ‘Nice doggie,’ until you can find a rock.
Heroing is one of the shortest-lived professions there is.
You can’t say civilization don’t advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way.
I bet you if I had met him and had a chat with him, I would have found him a very interesting and human fellow, for I never yet met a man that I didn’t like.
Will Rogers (1879-1935) American humorist
Saturday Evening Post (6 Nov 1926)
On Leon Trotsky. Earliest formulation of Rogers' motto found in print.Another cited reference: "When I die, my epitaph or whatever you call those signs on gravestones is going to read, 'I joked about every prominent man of my time, but I never met a man I dident like [sic].' I am so proud of that I can hardly wait to die so it can be carved."
-- Talk at a Boston church (Jun 1930), in Ben Yagoda, Will Rogers: A Biography, ch. 10 (1993)
The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover didn’t know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellow’s hands.
Boys, have you been following those appropriations? Well, the Secretary of the Treasury has asked Congress to please wait before passing any more appropriations. But Congress says: No! We are going to divide it up now. What do you suppose we are in Congress for, if it ain’t to split up the swag? Please pass the gravy.
For the American people are a very generous people and will forgive almost any weakness, with the possible exception of stupidity.
The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other. The one that’s out always looks the best.
We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others.
Now everything is funny as long as it is happening to somebody Else, but when it happens to you, why it seems to lose some of its Humor, and if it keeps on happening, why the entire laughter kinder Fades out of it.
Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.
Politics has got so expensive it takes lots of money to even get beat with.
You’ve got to be optimist to be a Democrat, and you’ve got to be a humorist to stay one.
We are here just for a spell and then pass on. So get a few laughs and do the best you can. Live your life so that whenever you lose it, you are ahead.
A comedian can only last till he either takes himself serious or his audience takes him serious.
No Nation has a monopoly on good things. Each one has something that the others could well afford to adopt.
There is nothing as stupid as an educated man if you get him off the thing he was educated in.