Rose Wilder Lane Quotes

Rose Wilder Lane was an American journalist, travel writer, novelist, political theorist and daughter of American writer Laura Ingalls Wilder. Along with two other female writers, Ayn Rand and Isabel Paterson, Lane is noted as one of the founders of the American libertarian movement. Wikipedia  

✵ 5. December 1886 – 30. October 1968
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Rose Wilder Lane: 43   quotes 4   likes

Famous Rose Wilder Lane Quotes

“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: 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.

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

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.

Rose Wilder Lane Quotes about life

“Men are alive on this earth, only because the imperative human desire is to attack the enemies of human life.”

Source: Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority (1943), p. viii.

Rose Wilder Lane Quotes about men

Rose Wilder Lane Quotes

“Representative government cannot express the will of the mass of the people, because there is no mass of the people”

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.

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

Said in 1936, as quoted in The Ghost in the Little House, prologue, by William V. Holtz (1993).

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