Top 725 Quotes & Sayings by Will Rogers - Page 10

Cities are like gentlemen, they are born, not made. You are either a city, or you are not, size has nothing to do with it. I bet San Francisco was a city from the very first time it had a dozen settlers. New York is "Yokel", but San Francisco is "City at Heart".

It's the greatest game I ever saw. You can't lose. Everybody buys to sell and nobody buys to keep. What's worrying me is who is going to be the last owner. It's just like an auction; the only one stuck is the last one.

I wonder if it isn't just cowardice instead of generosity that makes us give tips.

Say did you read in the papers about a bunch of Women up in British Columbia as a protest against high taxes, sit out in the open naked, and they wouldent put their clothes on? The authorities finally turned a Sprayer that you use on trees, on 'em. That may lead into quite a thing. Woman comes into the tax office nude, saying I won't pay. Well they can't search her and get anything. It sounds great. How far is it to British Columbia?

You got to do more than just live in the country to be a Farmer.

Every land or property owner in America would be tickled to death to pay 45 per cent of his profits, if he didn't have to pay anything if he didn't make it.

The old horse is coming back in a high lope. Thousands of people are riding a horse today that five years ago couldn't sit in a Ford with all the doors locked.

Just read the farm relief bill. It's just a political version of Einstein's last theory. If a farmer could understand it, he certainly would know more than to farm. He would be a professor at Harvard.

But we can't alibi all our ills by just knocking the old banker. First he loaned the money, then the people all at once wanted it back, and he didn't have it. Now he's got it again, and is afraid to loan it, so the poor devil don't know what to do.

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.

If any of us had a child that we thought was as bad as we know we are, we would have cause to start to worry.

Say, this new home building idea of President Hoover's sounds good. They are working out a lot of beneficial things. The only thing is it took 'em so long to think of any of 'em. We ought to have plans in case of depression, just like we do in case of fire, 'Walk, don't run, to the nearest exit.'

I am a great believer in high-priced people. If a thing cost a lot it may not be any better, but it adds a certain amount of class that the cheap thing can never approach; in the long run it's the higher-priced things that are the cheapest.

In the early days of the Indian Territory, there were no such things as birth certificates. You being there was certificate enough.

The trip across Arizona is just one oasis after another. You can just throw anything out and it will grow there, I like Arizona.

I was born because it was a habit in those days, people didn't know anything else ... I was not a Child Prodigy, because a Child Prodigy is a child who knows as much when it is a child as it does when it grows up.

Here's another way of putting it. Roosevelt wants recovery to start at the bottom. In other words, by a system of high taxes, he wants business to help the little fellow to get started and get some work, and then pay business back by buying things when he's at work. Business says, 'Let everybody alone. Let business alone, and quit monkeying with us, and we'll get everything going for you, and if we prosper, naturally the worker will prosper.'

It is not the return on my investment that I am concerned about; it's the return of my investment

Andrew Jackson was the first one to think up the idea to promise everybody that if they will vote for you, you will give them an office when you get it, and the more times they vote for you, the bigger the office.

We have been just going like a house afire, and we couldent see any reason why we shouldent keep right on burning. Our tastes were acquired on credit, and we wanted to keep on enjoying 'em on credit.

Get a sales tax, small on necessities and large on luxuries; then a stiff inheritance tax on the fellow that saves and don't spend. That will get him either way. A tax paid on the day you buy is not as tough as asking you for it the next year when you are broke.

Coolidge is a better example of evolution than either Bryan or Darrow, for he knows when not to talk, which is the biggest asset the monkey possesses over the human.

President Coolidge said, 'I don't want the Government to go into business.' Well, if I was Mr. Coolidge I wouldn't worry over that. The Government never has been accused of being a business man.

Golf is a wonderful exercise. You can stand on your feet for hours, watching somebody else putt.

There is a horse here-the furthest north of any horse, and he eats fish and travels on snowshoes.

They have passed the big inheritance tax, and that gets you when you are gone. You used to could die and be able to beat taxes, but not now. The undertaker don't go over your body as carefully as the assessor does your accumilated assets, and he gets his before the undertaker. They have it on these big fortunes now where they pay as high as 60 to 70 percent of what they leave. That's mighty expensive dying when it runs into money like that, and you won't see 'em dropping off as casually as they have been.

The Supreme Court is divided almost in half on the decisions. Talk about an international court. How would we ever agree with a lot of foreigners when we can't even agree among our own judges?

I guess there is no two races of people in worse repute with everybody than the international bankers, and the folks that put all those pins in new shirts.

One wants recovery to start from the bottom, and the other wants it to start from the top. I don't know which is right. I've never heard of anybody suggesting that they might start it in the middle, so I hereby make that suggestion. To start recovery halfway between the two, because it's the middle class that does everything anyhow. But I don't know anything about it.

Now these fellows in Washington wouldn't be so serious and particular if they only had to vote on what they thought was good for the majority of the people in the U.S. That would be a cinch. But what makes it hard for them is every time a bill comes up they have things to decide that have nothing to do with the merit of the bill. The principal thing is of course: What will this do for me personally back home?

Now they got such a high inheritance tax on 'em that you won't catch these old rich boys dying promiscuously like they did. This bill makes patriots out of everybody. You sure do die for your country if you die from now on.

The Democrats are going to change the name of the Hoover Dam. That is the silliest thing I ever heard of in politics . . . Lord if they feel that way about it, I don't see why they don't just reverse the two words.

... while the Republicans are smart enough to make money, the Democrats are smart enough to get in office every two or three times a century and take it away from 'em.

Give her a day, and then in return Momma gives you the other 364.

Prosperity this Winter is going to be enjoyed by everybody that is fortunate enough to get into the poor farm.

I see by the papers that they are going to do away with all the nuisance taxes. That means that a man can get a marriage license for nothing.

I represent what is left of a vanishing race, and that is the pedestrian. That I am still able to be here, I owe to a keen eye and a nimble pair of legs. But I know they'll get me someday.

If your time is worth anything, travel by air. If not, you might just as well walk.

Believe in something for another world, but don't be too set on what it is, and then you won't start out that life with a disappontment. Live your life so that whenever you lose you are ahead.

Our financial ills will never be settled till you fix it so every man will pay an income tax on what he earns, be it a farm, grocery store or municipal or government bonds.

I will never joke about old soldiers who try to get to reunions to talk over the war again. To talk of old times with old friends is the greatest thing in the world.

If this depression stays with us, the loser Tuesday is going to be the winner.

You can't legitimately kick on income tax, for it's on what you have made. You have already made it. But, look at land, farms, homes, stores, vacant lots. You pay year after year on them whether you make it or not.

I read where they are going to limit debate in the Senate. It used to be that a man could talk all day, but now, as soon as he tells all he knows, he has to sit down. Most of these birds will just be getting up and nodding now. Why, some of them won't be able to answer roll call.

We are sure living in a peculiar time. You get morefor not working than you will for working, and morefor not raising a hog than for raising it.

Parades should be classed as a nuisance and participants should be subject to a term in prison.

The whole financial structure of Wall Street seems to rise or fall on the mere fact that the Federal Reserve Bank raises or lowers the amount of interest. Any business that can't survive a one percent change must be skating on thin ice. Why even the poor farmer took a raise of another ten percent just to get a loan from the bank, and nobody from the government paid any attention. But you let Wall Street have a nightmare and the whole country has to help to get them back into bed again.

The good people of Dakota offered to give Calvin Coolidge a farm if he would live on it. I wouldn't advise you to give those people too much credit for generosity. There is not a farmer in any State in the West that wouldn't be glad to give him a farm if he will paint it, fix up the fences and keep up the series of mortgages that are on it. And if you think Coolidge ain't smart, you just watch him not take it.

We will never get anywhere with our finances till we pass a law saying...every time we appropriate something, we...pass another bill...stating where the money is coming from.

There is no income tax in Russia. But there's no income.

George Bernard Shaw of England stopped over just long enough to make one speech in Bombay, India, started a war and 100 Indians killed each other. That's what I call good speech-making. The only enthusiasm any of our speakers can rouse is a demand to kill the speaker.

You can take any line of business and skill and the ones who do it the best are the ones who get the most money for it.

Just been talking today out here to all the Senators investigating these stock swindles and overcapitalizations. There has been hundreds of millions lost. There ought to be some form of guardianship for people that buy all this junk. Education won't do it. The buyers are the ones we have educated up till they are just smart enough to fall for everything that comes along.

Asking Europe to disarm is like asking a man in Chicago to give up his life insurance.

I am proud of the fact there is not a human being that I have got it in for. I never met a man I didn't like.

Parades should be classed as a Nuisance and participants should be subject to a term in prison. They stop more work, inconvenience more people, stop more traffic, cause more accidents, entail more expense, and commit and cause I don't remember the other hundred misdemeanors.

We never will have any prosperity that is free from speculation till we pass a law that every time a broker or person sells something, he has got to have it sitting there in a bucket, or a bag, or a jug, or a cage, or a rat trap, or something, depending on what it is he is selling. We are continually buying something that we never get from a man that never had it.

The only way to solve the traffic problems of the country is to pass a law that only paid-for cars are allowed to use the highways. That would make traffic so scarce, we could use our boulevards for children's playgrounds.

They are each good when they are out, and each bad when they are in.

Fanatical religion driven to a certain point is almost as bad as none at all, but not quite.