Daily Inspiration Quote by Will Rogers

Will Rogers slips a whole social diagnosis into a folksy two-item list, and the trick is how casually he pairs them. “Money and women” reads like barroom wisdom, but the punch is in the asymmetry: the things most pursued are the things least understood. It’s a jab at masculine certainty, delivered in a tone that pretends certainty is exactly what we have. Rogers’ comic persona depended on that move - sounding plainspoken while quietly exposing how little the audience actually knows.

The line also works because “sought after” is doing double duty. With money, it’s ambition, security, status; with women, it’s desire, conquest, companionship, and social approval. By making the verb the same, Rogers implies both pursuits are treated as acquisitions. That’s the sting: he’s not romanticizing women, he’s calling out the way a culture trained men to treat women as a prize while remaining baffled by them as people.

Context matters. Rogers is writing from early 20th-century America: booming consumer capitalism, hard crashes, and a public learning to measure worth in dollars. At the same time, women’s roles were rapidly shifting - suffrage, new labor visibility, changing courtship norms - which made “knowing about” women feel, to many men, like trying to read a rulebook mid-game. Rogers turns that anxiety into humor, then flips it into a critique: ignorance isn’t accidental; it’s the natural byproduct of chasing.