“I am just an old country boy in a big town trying to get along. I have been eating pretty regular and the reason I have been is because I have stayed an old country boy.”
“The farmer has to be an optimist or he wouldn’t still be a farmer.”
“Steak on the plate went up. Steak on the hoof went down.”
“The president says, ‘There is lots of people worse off than the Farmers.’ I don’t know who it could be unless it is the fellow who holds the Mortgages on the Farms.”
“The government says they have loaned over One Billion dollars to the Farmers. In other words, we can’t help you make any money, but we will show you where you can owe some more.”
“Farmers have more Associations, and Bureaus, and Clubs, than they have pitchforks.”
“Farmers spend more time at Conventions than they do plowing.”
“You got to do more than just live in the country to be a Farmer.”
“Every time somebody has thought of relief for the farmer it has been to make it so he could borrow more money. What he needs is some way to pay back. Not some way to borrow more.”
“Don’t raise anything, except what fits your appetite. Then the price don’t worry you. Just raise all you can eat and let the low prices go by.”
“Wish all the Farmers would move to town one year, that’s the only way I know to clear the thing up.”
“Millions and millions of people don’t pay an income tax, because they don’t earn enough to pay on one, but you pay a land tax whether it ever did or ever will earn you a penny. You should pay on things that you buy outside of bare necessities. I think this sales tax is the best tax we have had in years.”
“Here is my Farm Relief bill: Every time a Southerner plants nothing on his farm but cotton year after year, and the Northerner nothing but wheat or corn, why, take a hammer and hit him twice right between the eyes. You may dent your hammer, but it will do more real good than all the bills you can pass in a year.”
“Rotation of crops and less automobiles will relieve the farmers whenever they decide to try it.”
“Farmers have about given up hope of getting farm relief and have decided to fertilize instead.”
“Farmers, get out your sense of humor. Congress meets to relieve you again next week.”
“Congress knew Coolidge would veto the farm bill. There was more politics than relief in that bill.”
“It looks to me like the candidates are trying to relieve the farmer of his vote, instead of his debts.”
“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.”
“(On Thanksgiving Day) The farmers can be thankful. Didn’t the Farm Board decide in Washington last week that they could have cheaper interest? All the farmers have to do now is to find something new to put up as security.”
“This session of Congress is also to relieve the farmer again, relieve him of any encouragement that he might have received during the last one.”
“George Washington was quite a farmer. He was a farmer, Civil Engineer and gentleman. He made enough at civil engineering to indulge in both the other luxuries.”
“There is not a better day in the world to be spent than with a lot of wise old cowmen around barbecued beef, black coffee and good “free holy” beans.”
“Cattlemen have lost more in the last few years than anybody and say less about it.”
“When you figure it right down, none of us are in a really essential business but the farmer, and he raises so much that even his business is partly non-essential.”
“I haven’t seen a tractor working all day. The country has gone sane and got back to horses. Farmers all look worse, but they feel better.”
“The man that found the 726-carat diamond in Africa, received $350,000 for it and wants to buy a farm and silk hat. Well, I can understand a man perhaps being eccentric enough to want to own a silk hat.”
“Flew through these dust storms last night. It’s a terrible thing, and it’s going to bring up some queer cases in law. If Colorado blows over and lights on top of Kansas, it looks kinder like Kansas ought to pay for the extra top soil, but Kansas can sue `em for covering up their crops.”
“In the Middle West now you got to put a brand on your soil, then in the Spring go on a round-up looking for it.”
“These dust storms…. Poor farmer spent a lifetime fixin’ his farm and everything, goes out and looks down at it, and it’s up above him.”
“It rained in the Middle West. Farmers are learning that the relief they get from the sky beats what they get from Washington.”
“Coolidge has the best idea on this farm relief. He said, ‘Farmers, you are in a hole. I can’t help you, but I will get in with you.’ He did. That made it fine so the farmers were satisfied as long as Coolidge was going to get in with them.”
“What the Secretary of Agriculture is trying to do is to teach the farmer corn acreage control, and the hogs birth control, and one is just as hard to make understand it as the other.”
(Will Rogers on soil conservation) “You know, we’re always talking about pioneers and what great folks the old pioneers were. Well, I think if we just stopped and looked at history in the face, the pioneer wasn’t a thing in the world but a guy that wanted something for nothing. He was a guy that wanted to live off of everything that nature had done. He wanted to cut a tree down that didn’t cost him anything, but he never did plant one. He wanted to plow up the land that should have been left to grass. We’re just now learning that we can rob from nature the same way as we can rob from an individual. All he had was an ax, and a plow, and a gun, and he just went out and lived off nature. But really, he thought it was nature he was living off of, but it was really future generations that he was living off of.”
(Will Rogers on land) “…out here I had been putting what little money I had in Ocean Frontage, for the sole reason that there was only so much of it and no more, and that they wasent making any more…” (Note: this is often paraphrased as: “buy land, because they aren’t making any more of it.”)
Randall Reeder gives a lot of “after-dinner” talks to agricultural groups as “Will Rogers”. The title of the talk is “I never met a Farmer I didn’t like.” Contact him at 614-477-0439 or Ask about his special price as a Will Rogers impersonator in Oklahoma.
Randall Reeder gives a lot of “after-dinner” talks to agricultural groups as “Will Rogers”. The title of the talk is “I never met a Farmer I didn’t like.” Contact him at 614-477-0439 or Ask about his special price as a Will Rogers impersonator in Oklahoma.