Famous Will Rogers' quotes
(From the Will Rogers Memorial Archives)

JANUARY 2001

No matter how much I may exaggerate it, it must have a certain amount of truth...Now rumor travels faster, but it don't stay put as long as truth.

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, you are ahead.

I don't make jokes, I just watch the Government and report the facts.

A diplomat tells you what he don't believe himself, and the man he's tellin' it to don't believe him, so it balances. Diplomats meet and eat, then rush out and wire their Government they've completely fooled the other fella.

We'll show the world we are prosperous, even if we have to go broke to do it.

I maintain that it should cost as much to get married as to get divorced. Make it look like marriage is worth as much as divorce, even if it ain't.

We can get all lathering at the time over some political campaign promise, or some conference pledge, but if the thing just drags along long enough we forget what it was that was originally promised. The short memories of the American voter is what keeps our politicians in office.

Never blame a legislative body for not doing something. When they do nothing, that don't hurt anybody. When they do something is when they become dangerous. Things in our country run in spite of government. Not by aid of it.

It's just got so that 90 percent of the people in this country don't give a damn. Politics ain't worrying this country one-tenth as much as parking space. We shouldn't elect a President; we should elect a magician.

If we got one-tenth of what was promised to us in these acceptance speeches there wouldn't be any inducement to go to heaven. "Elect 'em for a six-year term; not allow 'em to suceed themselves. That would keep their mind off politics.

That's one good thing about wars. It takes smarter men to figure out who loses 'em than it does to start 'em...The more ignorant you are the quicker you fight. Now if there is one thing that we do worse than any other nation, it is try and manage somebody else's affairs.

Nobody wants to be called common people, especially common people.

Lord, the money we do spend on Government and it's not one bit better than the government we got for one-third the money twenty years ago.

Liberty don't work as good in practice as it does in speeches. The Income Tax has made more Liars out of American people than Golf has.

It's not what you pay a man but what he costs you that counts. There is nothing as stupid as an educated man if you get him off the thing he was educated in.

Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.

I don't know why some of these states want to have their ancestry established by law. There must be a suspicion of doubt somewhere. (About the Scopes "monkey trial)

Our Foreign dealings are an Open Book, generally a Check Book. There is something about riding down the street on a prancing horse that makes you feel like something, even when you ain't a thing.

People talk peace. But men give their life's work to war. It won't stop 'til there is as much brains and scientific study put to aid peace as there is to promote war.

Take diplomacy out of a war and the thing will fall flat in a week.

You can be killed just as dead in an unjustified war as you can in one protecting your own home.

Nowadays it is about as big a crime to be dumb as it is to be dishonest.

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

Diplomats are nothing but high-class lawyers. Some ain't even high class.

No man is great if he thinks he is.

We'll hold the distinction of being the only Nation in the history of the world that ever went to the poor house in an automobile.

We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others.