Famous Rose Wilder Lane Quotes
Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority (1943)
Source: Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority (1943), p. 32
Give Me Liberty (1936)
Context: Representative government cannot express the will of the mass of the people, because there is no mass of the people; The People is a fiction, like The State. You cannot get a Will of the Mass, even among a dozen persons who all want to go on a picnic. The only human mass with a common will is a mob, and that will is a temporary insanity. In actual fact, the population of a country is a multitude of diverse human beings with an infinite variety of purposes and desires and fluctuating wills.
Give Me Liberty (1936)
Context: The picture of the economic revolution as the final step to freedom was false as soon as I asked myself that question. For, in actual fact, The State, The Government, cannot exist. They are abstract concepts, useful enough in their place, as the theory of minus numbers is useful in mathematics. In actual living experience, however, it is impossible to subtract anything from nothing; when a purse is empty, it is empty, it cannot contain a minus ten dollars. On this same plane of actuality, no State, no Government, exists. What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men.
Written in 1935, as quoted in The Ghost in the Little House, ch. 2, by William V. Holtz (1993).
Rose Wilder Lane Quotes about life
Source: Old Home Town (1935), Ch. 1.
Source: Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority (1943), p. viii.
Written in the 1920s, as quoted in The Ghost in the Little House, ch. 8, by William V. Holtz (1993).
Journal entry (1923), as quoted in The Ghost in the Little House, ch. 7, by William V. Holtz (1993).
Source: Old Home Town (1935), Ch. 1.
Rose Wilder Lane Quotes about men
Source: Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority (1943), p. 238
https://mises.org/system/tdf/The%20Discovery%20of%20Freedom_2.pdf?file=1&type=document Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority
Source: Old Home Town (1935), Ch. 1.
Give Me Liberty (1936)
Rose Wilder Lane Quotes
Give Me Liberty (1936)
Context: Representative government cannot express the will of the mass of the people, because there is no mass of the people; The People is a fiction, like The State. You cannot get a Will of the Mass, even among a dozen persons who all want to go on a picnic. The only human mass with a common will is a mob, and that will is a temporary insanity. In actual fact, the population of a country is a multitude of diverse human beings with an infinite variety of purposes and desires and fluctuating wills.
Source: Old Home Town (1935), Ch. 1.
Diary (sick and depressed) (December 9, 1933).
Source: Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority (1943), p. 239
https://mises.org/system/tdf/The%20Discovery%20of%20Freedom_2.pdf?file=1&type=document Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority
Source: Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority (1943), p. xii.
letter to Roger MacBride (March 5, 1968).
reflecting her impressions of the world of 1968, at the age of 81.
Journal entry (April 15, 1937), as quoted in The Ghost in the Little House, ch. 14, by William V. Holtz (1993)
Commenting on the domestic policies of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Letter to Dorothy Thompson (December 29, 1927).
Letter to Guy Moyston, (July 18, 1925).
Written in 1935, recalling her family’s migration from drought-stricken South Dakota to the Missouri Ozarks in 1894; the 650-mile trip had taken them six weeks.
As quoted in The Ghost in the Little House, ch. 1, by William V. Holtz (1993).
Source: Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority (1943), p. 239
https://mises.org/system/tdf/The%20Discovery%20of%20Freedom_2.pdf?file=1&type=document Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority
Letters to Guy Moyston, (August 25, 1924 and July 11, 1925).
Letter from Albania to Laura Ingalls Wilder, (October 27, 1926).
Diary (May 29, 1933).
On the Way Home, ch. 1 (1962).
Said in 1936, as quoted in The Ghost in the Little House, prologue, by William V. Holtz (1993).
Letter to the Clarence Day (June 10, 1926)
Describing her stop on a remote Russian plateau while with the Red Cross after WWI.
Source: Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority (1943), p. 18
Source: The Lady and The Tycoon: Letters of Rose Wilder Lane and Jasper Crane (1973), pp. 332-333 (letter July 13, 1963)
Source: Give Me Liberty (1936), p. 47