Rose Wilder Lane: Use

Rose Wilder Lane was American journalist. Explore interesting quotes on use.
Rose Wilder Lane: 86 quotes4 likes

“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

“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.”

Rose Wilder Lane

Written in 1935, as quoted in The Ghost in the Little House, ch. 2, by William V. Holtz (1993).

“I so much like real things - the realities that come naturally from the depths of us like - what shall I say? - the way trees grow, from some inner essential principle of them, just expressing itself.”

Rose Wilder Lane

Letter to Arthur Griggs (June 22, 1920).

“To believe that any action based on an ignorance of fact can possibly succeed, is to abandon the use of reason.”

Rose Wilder Lane

Give Me Liberty (1936)

“The words we use are the most clumsy symbols for meanings, and to suppose that such words as "war," "glory," "justice," "liberty,” “home," mean the same in two languages, is an error.”

Rose Wilder Lane

Give Me Liberty (1936)

“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.”

Rose Wilder Lane

Journal entry (1923), as quoted in The Ghost in the Little House, ch. 7, by William V. Holtz (1993).

“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)

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

Rose Wilder Lane

Source: Give Me Liberty (1936), p. 47