Rose Wilder Lane > Quotes

“Happiness is something that comes into our lives through doors we don't even remember leaving open.”
― Rose Wilder Lane

“Anyone who says that economic security is a human right, has been to much babied. While he babbles, other men are risking and losing their lives to protect him. They are fighting the sea, fighting the land, fighting disease and insects and weather and space and time, for him, while he chatters that all men have a right to security and that some pagan god—Society, The State, The Government, The Commune—must give it to them. Let the fighting men stop fighting this inhuman earth for one hour, and he will learn how much security there is.”
― Rose Wilder Lane

“No state, no government exists. What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men.”
― Rose Wilder Lane

“Making the best of things is a damn poor way of dealing with them. My life has been a series of escapes from that quicksand.”
― Rose Wilder Lane

“It is precisely democracy which is destroying the American political structure, American law, and the American economy.”
― Rose Wilder Lane

“Writing fiction is ... an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.”
― Rose Wilder Lane

“Living is fighting for life, and when anyone does not know this fact, someone else is doing his fighting for him.”
― Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery Of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority

“(...) all men are united in one common effort to survive on this earth. All men share a common human necessity, a common human aim. All men are equally entitled to life, and therefore to the necessities of life.”
― Rose Wilder Lane

“So long as any large group of persons, anywhere on this earth, believe the ancient superstition that some Authority is responsible for their welfare, they will set up some image of that Authority and try to obey it. And the result will be poverty and war.”
― Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery Of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority

“Indeed, nothing but smuggling kept the poor from starving to death under that Government monopoly, benevolently planned for their good.”
― Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery Of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority

“A “planned economy” destroys Government because when men use force in an attempt to control productive energies, they have no means of knowing real costs, and these costs automatically increase at an increasing rate until the people can no longer pay them.”
― Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery Of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority

“Being absolute, and maintained by police force, a Government monopoly need not please its customers.”
― Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery Of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority

“The fact is that nothing but human energy working productively can produce any of the necessities of human life, any human living conditions.”
― Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery Of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority

“The basis of all this thinking is ignorance of creative energy; it is ignorance of the real nature of human beings; it is the ancient, pagan superstition that Authority controls a static, limited universe. This belief is at least six thousand years old. Acting upon this belief, human beings have tried every one of these ideas now advanced as revolutionary, and many more; they have tried every conceivable way of making a human world in which human energy can work at its natural job of making this earth habitable for human beings, and never in one of those centuries have they succeeded (with that pagan belief) in using their energies well enough to get them all enough to eat. Yet they keep on trying, because individuals control human energy in accordance with their religious faith, whatever it may be. And belief in Authority controlling a fixed, limited, changeless universe is the pagan religion. If this belief were true, then a human world controlled by some kind of human Authority would work. Then such a world would have worked, at least once, at least fairly well, during six thousand years of efforts to make it work. It does not work, for the same reason that a perpetual-motion machine will not work, because the attempt to make it work is based on a false belief, and not on fact.”
― Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery Of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority

“I was once at heart a revolutionist, and you can tell me nothing about poverty, nothing about suffering, the injustices, the hunger, the apparently needless cruelties that exist from coats to coast of this country. But you can tell me no longer that they are the result of a capitalist system, because there is no system here. All these men who in various ways, for various purposes and with widely varying results to the welfare and happiness of others, struggle to direct American industry, are expensive. They are expensive in that they draw large amounts of actual money from the streams of productive power and pour these sums back into the streams again by spending them for their own individual purposes. But if this chaos were replaced by a system, a social order so perfect that there would be no trace of selfishness in it, an order perfectly functioning for the sole purpose of serving the public good, these men must be replaced by a bureaucracy. And a bureaucracy is expensive, too.”
― Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery Of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority

“In 1933 a group of sincere and ardent collectivists seized control of the Democratic Party, used it as a means of grasping Federal power, and enthusiastically, from motives which many of them regard as the highest idealism, began to make America over. The Democratic Party is now a political mechanism having a genuine political principle: national socialism.

The Republican Party remains a political mechanism with no political principle. It does not stand for American individualism. Its leaders continue to play the 70-year-old American professional sport of vote-getting, called politics.

Americans (of both parties) who stand for American political principles therefore have no means of peaceful political action. A vote for the New Deal approves national socialism, but a vote for the Republican Party does not repudiate national socialism.”
― Rose Wilder Lane, Give Me Liberty

“Yet twenty-two hundred years ago, there were scientists. Before Rome was an outlaw’s camp in the far west, Aristotle was saying, “If a man grasps truths that can not be other than they are, in the way in which he grasps the definitions through which demonstrations take place, he will not have opinion, but knowledge.”
― Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery Of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority

“Let him get out on the front lines. Let him bring one slow freight through a snowstorm in the Rockies; let him drive one rivet to hold his apartment roof over his head. Let him keep his own electric light burning through one quiet, cosy winter evening when mist is freezing to the wires. Let him make, from seed to table, just one slice of bread, and we will hear no more from him about the human right to security. No man’s security is any greater than his own self-reliance. If every man and woman worth living did not stand up to the job of living, did not take risk and danger and exhaustion beyond exhaustion and go on fighting for one thin hope of victory in the certainty of death, there would not be a human being alive today.”
― Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery Of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority

“You must take into account the actual distinction between truth and fact. It is beyond all human power to tell all the facts. Your whole lifetime spent at nothing else would not tell all the facts of one morning in your life, just any ordinary morning when you get up, dress, get breakfast and wash the dishes. Facts are infinite in number. The truth is a meaning underlying them; you tell the truth by selecting the facts to illustrate it.”
― Rose Wilder Lane

“No one who sees the plain fact that all moral and spiritual values of human life are in the individual, can possibly see any spiritual value in war. War comes from the individual’s ignorance of his own nature, from his placing responsibility for the moral values of his own life in a fantasy, in a pagan god which he imagines exists outside himself and superior to him and controlling him—an Immortal Italy, a German Race, a Nation, a State.”
― Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery Of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority

“Anyone who says that economic security is a human right, has been too much babied. While he babbles, other men are risking and losing their lives to protect him. They are fighting the sea, fighting the land, fighting diseases and insects and weather and space and time, for him, while he chatters that all men have a right to security and that some pagan god—Society, The State, The Government, The Commune—must give it to them. Let the fighting men stop fighting this inhuman earth for one hour, and he will learn how much security there is.”
― Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery Of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority

“In communism, the men who establish the commune plan its economy.”
― Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery Of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority

“Between the 15th century and the 17th century, the Moslems forgot the God of Abraham, Christ, and Mohammed. They came to think of God as Authority, controlling men. I believe they could find no other explanation for the ruin of their world. They said it was an act of God; it was completely unreasonable, so they said that God is Unknowable. And this belief, prevailing among the millions, affected the newly-converted Turks, so that they, too, reverted to paganism. The Saracen world and the Turks who had conquered it, sank into stagnation.”
― Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery Of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority

“I was once at heart a revolutionist, and you can tell me nothing about poverty, nothing about the suffering, the injustices, the hunger, the apparently needless cruelties that exist from coast to coast of this country. But you can tell me no longer that they are the result of a capitalist system, because there is no system here.

All these men who in various ways, for various purposes and with widely varying results to the welfare and happiness of others, struggle to direct American industry, are expensive. They are expensive in that they draw large amounts of actual money from the streams of productive power and pour these sums back into the streams again by spending them for their own individual purposes.

But if this chaos were replaced by a system, a social order so perfect that there would be no trace of selfishness in it, an order perfectly functioning for the sole purpose of serving the public good, these men must be replaced by a bureaucracy. And a bureaucracy is expensive, too.”
― Rose Wilder Lane, Give Me Liberty

“Ask why you can’t lift an innocent finger without permission, and your lack of the simplest reasoning power baffles them. One must always have a permit; how else could the authorities maintain the social order? In every instance, that will stop you. There is no other way by which Authority can maintain a social order. The tragedy of the Old World is that this only way by which Authority can maintain a social order must inevitably destroy the social order and any form of Authority that tries to maintain it. The energy of a constantly increasing number of bureaucrats has always been subtracted from productive energy in the Old World.”
― Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery Of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority

“Since Government’s planned economy has always kept people poor, the almost static living conditions through all Old World history seem to verify the pagan belief in a static universe. All Old World thinking about economics assumes that wealth cannot be increased, but must be divided.”
― Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery Of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority

“Nobody can plan the actions of even a thousand living persons, separately. Anyone attempting to control millions must divide them into classes, and make a plan applying to these classes.

But these classes do not exist. No two persons are alike. No two are in the same circumstances; no two have the same abilities; beyond getting the barest necessities of life, no two have the same desires.

Therefore the men who try to enforce, in real life, a planned economy that is their theory, come up against the infinite diversity of human beings. The most slavish multitude of men that was ever called "demos" or "labor" or "capital" or "agriculture" or "the masses," actually are men; they are not sheep.

Naturally, by their human nature, they escape in all directions from regulations applying to non-existent classes. It is necessary to increase the number of men who supervise their actions. Then (for officials are human, too) it is necessary that more men supervise the supervisors. Still, individuals will continue to act individually, in ways that they plan. These ways do not fit into Authority's plan. So still more men are needed, imperatively needed, to stop or to supervise these new ways of acting; and more men to supervise these supervisors; and more men to co-ordinate the constantly increasing complexity of all this supervision.

An attempt to exercise a control of individuals that in reality does not exist, must increase in volume.”
― Rose Wilder Lane

“That Roman Peace was designed to last forever. When Diocletian perfected it, its economy was so thoroughly planned and so well administered that farmers could no longer farm nor workers work, and Government took care of them on the relief that taxes provided, until the increasing taxes pushed so many farmers and workers onto tax-supported relief that there was not enough productive energy left to pay the taxes, and the Roman empire with its world peace collapsed into the Dark Ages.”
― Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery Of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority

“The feudal system was the most perfect social system in history. It even had a safety valve, to release any pressure of energy in it. An exceptional, ambitious, and gifted boy might get his master’s permission to learn to read and write, and enter The Church. Church discipline was strict, but The Church represented the spiritual world, and in it, all men were equal. Any priest might become the Pope. A serf’s son did become a Pope.”
― Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery Of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority

“The only way to make me stand in line for half an hour to buy a spool of thread, or to make me spend six weeks in getting stamps on paper when I want to drive a car, is to use the energy of persons who otherwise would be making more thread and more cars.”
― Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery Of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority