ROSE WILDER LANE

Making the best of things is... a damn poor way of dealing with them. My whole life has been a series of escapes from that quicksand.

As novices, we think we're entirely responsible for the way people treat us. I have long since learned that we are responsible only for the way we treat people.

The real protection of life and property, always and everywhere.

Writing fiction is... an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.

The need for Government is the need for force; where force is unnecessary, there is no need for Government.

I came out of the Soviet Union no longer a communist, because I believed in personal freedom.

The question is whether personal freedom is worth the terrible effort, the never-lifted burden and risks of self-reliance?

One thing I hate about the New Deal is that it is killing what, to me, is the American pioneering spirit. I simply do not know what to tell my own boys, leaving school and confronting this new world whose ideal is Security and whose practice is dependence upon government instead of upon one’s self.

It was not seen that woman’s place was in the home until she began to go out of it; the statement was a reply to an unspoken challenge, it was attempted resistance to irresistible change.

When Government has a monopoly of all production and all distribution, as many Governments have, it can not permit any economic activity that competes with it.

The new always competes with the old and destroys it. Men who build railroads destroy stage coach lines.

One thing I hate about the New Deal is that it is killing what, to me, is the American pioneering spirit. I simply do not know what to tell my own boys, leaving school and confronting this new world whose ideal is Security and whose practice is dependence upon government instead of upon one's self. All the old character-values seem simply insane from a practical point of view; the self-reliant, the independent, the courageous man is penalized from every direction.

Curiosity is the hunger of the human mind.

Life is a thin narrowness of taken-for-granted, a plank over a canyon in a fog.

There is a city myth that country life was isolated and lonely; the truth is that farmers and their families then had a richer social life than they have now. They enjoyed a society organic, satisfying and whole, not mixed and thinned with the life of town, city and nation as it now is.

Life is a thin narrowness of taken-for-granted, a plank over a canyon in a fog. There is something under our feet, the taken-for-granted. A table is a table, food is food, we are we - because we don't question these things. And science is the enemy because it is the questioner. Faith saves our souls alive by giving us a universe of the taken-for-granted.

The first twenty years of my life were wasted. I didn't fit my environment, and I didn't know any other.

As an American I am of course fundamentally opposed to democracy and to anyone advocating or defending democracy, which in theory and practice is the basis of socialism.

Plants and animals repeat routine, but men who are not restrained will go into the future like explorers into a new country.

What I can't understand is, how can anybody figure now that the government can support us, when we support the government.

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.

An Old World revolution is only a movement around a motionless center; it never breaks out of the circle. Firm in the center is belief in Authority.

Nothing whatever but the constitutional law, the political structure, of these United States protects any American from arbitrary seizure of his property and his person, from the Gestapo and the Storm Troops, from the concentration camp, the torture chamber, the revolver at the back of his neck in a cellar.

The longest lives are short; our work lasts longer.

no one in a group of three is the same person he (she, it) is in a group of two. No more than he is the same in a group of two as he is alone.