Rose Wilder Lane: Quotes about men

“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. This means that it can not permit any new use of productive energy, for the new always competes with the old and destroys it. Men who build railroads destroy stage coach lines.”

Rose Wilder Lane

Source: Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority (1943), p. 32

Men

“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

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.

Men

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

Rose Wilder Lane

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

Life , Men

“Men stood up in Parliament and pointed to the American facts. What had created the clipper ships? Not the American government. Not protection, but lack of protection. What made the British marine second-rate? Safety, shelter, protection under the British Navigation Acts… The result was catastrophe. American clipper ships ran away with the Indian trade. They ran away with the trade in England's own home ports.”

Rose Wilder Lane

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

Home , Men

“Two deep human desires were at war … the longing for stability, for form, for permanence, which in its essence is the desire for death, and the opposing hunger for movement, change, instability and risk, which are life. Men came from the east and built these American towns because they wished to go no farther, and the towns they built were shaped by the urge to go onward.”

Rose Wilder Lane

Source: Old Home Town (1935), Ch. 1.

Life , Death , Men , Hunger

“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

Give Me Liberty (1936)

Question , Freedom , Falseness , Mathematics