Daily Telegram #1019, Thoughts Of Will Rogers On The Late Slumps In Stocks (31 October 1929)
Daily telegrams
Context: Sure must be a great consolation to the poor people who lost their stock in the late crash to know that it has fallen in the hands of Mr. Rockefeller, who will take care of it and see it has a good home and never be allowed to wander around unprotected again. There is one rule that works in every calamity. Be it pestilence, war, or famine, the rich get richer and poor get poorer. The poor even help arrange it.
“These hands were almost crippled digging coal so that rich men in Boston might grow even richer.”
Source: In the Drift (1985), Chapter 4, “Mutagen Fair” (p. 130)
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Michael Swanwick 96
American science fiction author 1950Related quotes
As quoted in Day's Collacon: An Encyclopaedia of Prose Quotations (1884), edited by Edward Parsons Day, p. 326
Comparable to "Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer" (translated: "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him", Voltaire, Épître à l'Auteur du Livre des Trois Imposteurs (10 November 1770).
“Solid men of Boston, banish long potations!
Solid men of Boston, make no long orations!”
Pitt and Dundas's Return to London from Wimbledon, "American Song", from Lyra Urbanica. Compare: "Solid men of Boston, make no long orations! Solid men of Boston, banish strong potations!", "Billy Pitt and the Farmer", from Debrett’s Asylum for Fugitive Pieces, vol. ii. p. 250.
June 1944. Marcel Stein, Field Marshal Von Manstein, a Portrait, p. 247.
“If Americans were not always aware that they were rich men individually”
The Eve of the Revolution (1918)
Context: If Americans were not always aware that they were rich men individually, they were at all events well instructed, by old-world visitors who came to observe them with a certain air of condescension, that collectively at least their material prosperity was a thing to be envied even by more advanced and more civilized peoples. Therefore any man called upon to pay a penny tax and finding his pocket bare might take a decent pride in the fact, which none need doubt since foreigners like Peter Kalm found it so, that "the English colonies in this part of the world have increased so much in... their riches, that they almost vie with old England."
“Needs must it be hard, since it is so seldom found. How would it be possible, if salvation were ready to our hand, and could without great labour be found, that it should be by almost all men neglected? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”
Et sane arduum debet esse, quod adeo raro reperitur. Qui enim posset fieri, si salus in promptu esset et sine magno labore reperiri posset, ut ab omnibus fere negligeretur? Sed omnia praeclara tam difficilia, quam rara sunt.
Part V, Prop. XLII, Scholium
Ethics (1677)