Will Rogers Quotes

We have witnessed the most extraordinary devastation. The magnitude of the situation is unbelievable. It's just heartbreaking.

In 1874, Mary Fraser accompanied her husband Hugh to Hong Kong, arriving hours after a typhoon had wrecked the island. Some 10,000 boat families had drowned in the harbour. There was no way to avoid the bloated bodies, and when Mary disembarked, she felt her foot land on something soft.

Death and worse happened on the plains.

Then was I as a tree whose boughs did bend with fruit; but in one night, a storm or robbery, call it what you will, shook down my mellow hangings, nay, my leaves, and left me bare to weather.

War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.

War remains the decisive human failure.

My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

Every member of my family was displaced by Katrina.

Those who survived the San Francisco earthquake said, 'Thank God, I'm still alive.' But, of course, those who died, their lives will never be the same again.

I saw my hometown burning that day.

War is wretched beyond description, and only a fool or a fraud could sentimentalize its cruel reality.

How could I share with you how I felt when two towers that I loved, two pieces of steel and glass and concrete fell down, when actually they took with them thousands of human lives? That is the actual tragedy. But those towers were almost human for me. I was in love with them, and that's why I married them with a tight rope.

I had seen people who had lost everything and everyone they loved to war, famine, and natural disasters.

It makes twenty years or more of peace to make a man. It takes only twenty seconds of war to destroy him.

War is never cheap or easy.

Tomorrow the war will start, There will be widows. There will be orphans. Who knows what tomorrow will bring.

If the death and disaster that now fall upon innocent people through the year and over our country as a whole were concentrated into one calamity, we would shudder at the tremendous catastrophe. The loss is no less disastrous because diffused in time and space.

in the clash of contending armies and amid the groans of the wounded and the dying, the interests of education are sacrificed – the pacific virtues take their flight from the earth

Every war is a national misfortune.

War being the greatest of evils, all its accessories necessarily partake of the same character.

Within hours of the impact, most of Mexico and the United States must have been reduced to a desolate wasteland of the most appalling, agonizing destruction. Where only the day before there had been fertile landscapes, full of animals and plants of all kinds, now there was a vast, smoldering netherworld, mercifully hidden from view by black clouds of roiling smoke.

The Romans, though it was a terrible struggle to collect the timber, raised their platforms in twenty-one days, having as described before stripped the whole area in a circle round the town to a distance of ten miles. The countryside like the City was a pitiful sight; for where once there had been a lovely vista of woods and parks there was nothing but desert and stumps of trees. No one - not even a foreigner - who had seen the Old Judea and the glorious suburbs of the City, and now set eyes on her present desolation, could have helped sighing and groaning at so terrible a change; for every trace of beauty had been blotted out by war, and nobody who had known it in the past and came upon it suddenly would have recognized the place: when he was already there he would still have been looking for the City.

Isaac Cline was a creature of his times. He embodied the hubris of his times and, in many ways, was a victim of the storm, not just in material ways - loss of a family member and damage to the town - but also in metaphoric terms.

War is very sad and small life is pathetically fragile at times.