Talk:Will Rogers

"I am not so much concerned with the return on capital as I am with the return of capital."

Will Rogers never freaking said it. Should that be noted somewhere, since it's repeated constantly in financial publications? Hanxu9 15:27, 17 November 2011 (UTC)

Correct Sourcing

Trickle Down

The "trickle down" quote is cited as being in the November 26th edition of the St. Petersburg Times, but the article entitled "And Here's How It All Happened" appears on page 4 of section 1 of the November 27th edition. However, the scan of the edition of the 27th (a Sunday) is included at the end of the 26th's edition in Google's news scans. So this is the question I have: is the correct date the one on the page, or was the Sunday edition included with the Saturday edition, so as not to break the sabbath in the deep south? I also can provide a very large and readable image of the scan I assembled from screen grabs if anyone can't access the page through Google's archive. Will provide a link on request if people can't seem to find it. --RedHeron (talk) 23:05, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Unsourced

Wikiquote no longer allows unsourced quotations, and they are in process of being removed from our pages (see Wikiquote:Limits on quotations); but if you can provide a reliable and precise source for any quote on this list please move it to Will Rogers. --Antiquary 18:40, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

• Don't gamble; take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don't go up, don't buy it.

• Even if you're on the right track you'll get run over if you just sit there.

• I don't care how little your country is, you got a right to run it like you want to. When the big nations quit meddling then the world will have peace.

• I don't care how poor and inefficient a little country is; they like to run their own business.

• I got a telegram from Amarillo, Texas, and they want me to say something about mothers-in-law. They say thay are having a mother-in-law day. I had a wonderful mother-in-law, and I always felt — after looking at mothers-in-law and seeing sons-in-law — I always felt that the jokes were on the wrong ones. No sir, you can look through everything I ever did write or say, and you never did hear me tell a joke about any mother-in-law, or any creed, color or religion, either.

• I know men that would make my wife a better husband than I am; but, darn it, I'm not going to give her to 'em.

• I represent a new class of people in this country, the newly poor.

• I tell you, this finding out how to govern a country, or even a state, or county, or even town, has got the whole world licked. There is not a type of government that can point with complete pride and say: There, this is the best that can be had!

• 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.

• I'm not a real movie star. I've still got the same wife I started out with twenty-eight years ago.

• If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?

• It's great to be great, but it's greater to be human.

• Just put me in a place where I can watch Congress spend my money.
  • Said upon hearing he would receive a statue in the National Statuary Hall Collection

• Liberty don't work as good in practice as it does in speeches.

• Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.

• Live your life so that whenever you lose, you're ahead.

• My ancestors didn't come over on the Mayflower, but they met 'em at the boat.
  • Variant: My forefathers didn't come over on the Mayflower, but they met the boat.

• My idea of an honest man is a fellow who declares income tax on money he sold his vote for.

• No man is great if he thinks he is.

• No nation ever had two better friends that we have. You know who they are? The Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

• Nothing you can't spell will ever work.

• On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does.

• Our constitution protects aliens, drunks and U.S. Senators.

• People are marvelous in their generosity if they just know the cause is there.

• Somebody is always telling us in the paper how to prevent war. There is only one way in the world to prevent war and that is for every nation to tend to its own business. Trace any war and you will find some nation was trying to tell some other nation how to run their business. All these nations are interfering with some other nation’s personal affairs but with an eye to business. Why don’t we let the rest of the world act like it wants to.

• A Democrat never adjourns--he is born, becomes of voting age and starts right in arguing over something, and his political adjournment is his date with the undertaker.

• The Democrats ran on "Honesty" and I told 'em at the time they would never get anywhere. It was too radical for politics. The Republicans ran on "Common Sense" and the returns showed that there were 8 million more people in the United States who had "Common Sense" enough not to believe that there was "Honesty" in politics.

• When the Okies left Oklahoma and moved to California, they raised the average intelligence levels in both states.

• The only difference between death and taxes is that death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets.

• Nothing as stupid as an educated man if you get him off the thing he was educated on.

Dubious

The First law of holes is attributed to Dennis Healey per:

• Apperson, George Latimer (1993, 2006). The Wordsworth dictionary of proverbs. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd. pp. 283. ISBN 978-1840223118. 
• (8 November 1986)"Interview: Denis Healey; Healey's First law of holes is to stop digging". New Statesman 9.

Toddst1 (talk) 20:34, 7 April 2012 (UTC)

I question whether the quotation(s) found in "The Manly Wisdom of Will Rogers", in ‪The Friars Club Bible of Jokes, Pokes, Roasts, and Toasts have a reliable provenance. Jcejhay (talk) 14:11, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

"Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously and their politicians as a joke." — Spurious?

Now that the current election just finished, I've seen this quote on social media. It's not on the Will Rogers page here, but searching DuckDuckGo shows it on many conservative pages attributed to Will Rogers. A simple search of Google Books returned many results especially in books regarding politics. I did not know how to search for a book by Will Rogers that might include this quotation.

Lastly, when I first saw it today it seemed familiar to me, as if it might have been posted in earlier years as well, but I did not search to verify that. Sorry this is all I can do! I would be grateful if somebody could research this a bit better than I am able to. Thank you! Geekdiva (talk) 06:54, 8 November 2020 (UTC)

This quotation is discussed in the Quote Investigator:[People Are Taking Their Comedians Seriously, and Their Politicians as a Joke|https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/04/30/comedian/] —Danorton (talk) 13:32, 8 November 2020 (UTC)