Quotes from 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.

Men in Government monopolize the necessary use of force; they are not using their energies productively; they are not milking cows. To get butter, they must use guns; they have nothing else to use.

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

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

Happiness is something that comes into our lives through doors we don't even remember leaving open.

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.

That way of life against which my generation rebelled had given us grim courage, fortitude, self-discipline, a sense of individual responsibility, and a capacity for relentless hard work.

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.

Moslems had gone back to the static, changeless universe and the controlling Authority. They had escaped from the responsibility of freedom. Moslem life was stagnant for six centuries because Moslems no longer knew that individuals control themselves and are responsible for their own acts and their own lives and for the human world they make.

The Saracens had no use for these measurements, no reason to sail around the earth to India. They were in India. Cathay and the Spice Islands were on their doorstep. But Europeans needed a route to India, and the Crusades taught them that they did. The riches of the world were in the East, and the Saracens had them. Europeans were the Have Not nations, and they knew it.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Happiness is something that comes into our lives through doors we don't even remember leaving open.

No state, no government exists. What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men.

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.

It is precisely democracy which is destroying the American political structure, American law, and the American economy.

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