Will Rogers (1879-1935)

William Penn Adair Rogers was an American vaudeville performer, actor, and humorous social commentator. He was born as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, in the Indian Territory, and is known as "Oklahoma's Favorite Son". As an entertainer and humorist, he traveled around the world three times, made 71 films, and wrote more than 4,000 nationally syndicated newspaper columns. By the mid-1930s, Rogers was hugely popular in the United States for his leading political wit and was one of the higher paid Hollywood film stars. He died in 1935 with aviator Wiley Post when their small airplane crashed on takeoff from a lagoon near Point Barrow in northern Alaska.

Quotes

Government spending? I don't know what it's all about. I don't know any more about this thing than an economist does, and, God knows, he doesn't know much.
Alexander Hamilton started the U.S. Treasury with nothing -- and that was the closest our country has ever been to being even.
I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat.
There is not a man in the country that can't make a living for himself and family. But he can't make a living for them and his government, too, the way his government is living. What the government has got to do is live as cheap as the people.
You can't say civilizations don't advance...in every war they kill you in a new way.
I don't care how poor and inefficient a little country is; they like to run their own business. 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.
Liberty don't work as good in practice as it does in speeches.
Baseball is a skilled game. It's America's game - it, and high taxes.
If you make any money, the government shoves you in the creek once a year with it in your pockets, and all that don't get wet you can keep.
On account of us 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.
People love high ideals, but they got to be about 33-percent plausible.
I see where we are starting to pay some attention to our neigbors to the south. We could never understand why Mexico wasn't just crazy about us; for we have always had their good will, and oil and minerals, at heart.
Parades should be classed as a nuisance and participants should be subject to a term in prison.
An economist's guess is liable to be as good as anybody else's.
Noah must have taken into the Ark two taxes, one male and one female. And did they multiply bountifully! Next to guinea pigs, taxes must have been the most prolific animals.
The man with the best job in the country is the Vice President. All he has to do is get up every morning and say, "How's the President?"
You can't say civilization don't advance...in every war they kill you a new way.
Our Constitution protects aliens, drunks, and U.S. senators.
The income tax has made liars out of more Americans than golf.
Try to live your life so that you wouldn't be afraid to sell the family parrot to the town gossip.