‘It’s Serious Business This Making People Laugh’

Will Rogers called himself “just an old country boy,” but no simple bumpkin could have come up with such timelessly wise and witty lines as these:

- “Party politics is the most narrow-minded occupation in the World . . . All you would have to do to make some men Atheists is just to tell them the Lord belonged to the Opposition Political Party.”

- “There is nothing as stupid as an educated man if you get him off the thing he was educated in.”

- “It’s serious business this making people laugh.”

- “An economist is a man who can tell you what can happen under any given conditions, and his guess is liable to be just as good as anybody else’s.”

- “America invents everything, but the trouble is we get tired of it the minute the new is wore off.”

- “I love a dog. He does nothing for political reasons.”

- “Every time we have an election, we get in worse men and the country keeps right on going. Times have proven only one thing and that is you can’t ruin this country ever, with politics.”

- “The budget is a mythical beanbag. Congress votes mythical beans into it and then tries to reach in and pull real beans out.”

- “All our senators and congressmen are away from Washington now. This is the season of the year when they do the least damage to their country.”

- “Nobody wants to be called common people, especially common people.”

- “It’s not what you pay a man but what he costs you that counts.”

- “Liberty don’t work as good in practice as it does in speeches.”

- “The short memories of the American voter is what keeps politicians in office.”

- “I would rather be the guy that bought the Brooklyn Bridge than the guy that sold it.”

- “It is kinder funny, but no matter how common our blood is, we hate to lose any of it.”

- “Live your life so if you lose you are still ahead.”