“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)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The picture of the economic revolution as the final step to freedom was false as soon as I asked myself that question. …" by Rose Wilder Lane?
Rose Wilder Lane photo
Rose Wilder Lane 43
American journalist 1886–1968

Related quotes

Halldór Laxness photo

“In actual fact, no man is honest when sober; in actual fact, you cannot believe a single word that a sober man says. I wish I were drunk myself.”

Halldór Laxness book The Atom Station

Bui Arland
Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

“One of the first algebraists to accept negative numbers was… placed negative numbers on a par with positive numbers and gave both roots of a quadratic equation, even when both were negative. Both Girard and Harriot used the minus sign for the operation of subtraction and for negative numbers.”

Morris Kline (1908–1992) American mathematician

Source: Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (1972), pp. 252-253.

“The usefulness of observation and measurement in testing economic theories arises because the theorems of economics are supposed to relate to the actual world… Any economic theorem rigorously deduced from given postulates may be regarded as a hypothesis about the actual world which xperience may show to be false.”

Richard Stone (1913–1991) British economist, Nobel Memorial Prize winner

Source: The Role of Measurement in Economics. 1951, p. 12

“Human beings hold two types of theories of action. There is the one that they espouse, which is usually expressed in the form of stated beliefs and values. Then there is the theory that they actually use; this can only be inferred from observing their actions, that is, their actual behavior.”

Chris Argyris (1923–2013) American business theorist/Professor Emeritus/Harvard Business School/Thought Leader at Monitor Group

Source: On organizational learning (1999), p. 126: as cited in: Kenneth D. Shearer, ‎Robert Burgin (2001) The Readers' Advisor's Companion. p. 39

John D. Barrow photo

“The quantum revolution showed us why the old picture of a vacuum as an empty box was untenable.”

John D. Barrow (1952–2020) British scientist

...Gradually, this exotic new picture of quantum nothingness succumbed to experimental exploration... in the form of vacuum tubes, light bulbs and X-rays. Now the 'empty' space itself started to be probed. ...There was always something left: a vacuum energy that permeated every fibre of the Universe.
Source: The Book of Nothing (2009), chapter nought "Nothingology—Flying to Nowhere"

Carl Ludwig Siegel photo

“I am afraid that mathematics will perish by the end of this century if the present trend for senseless abstractin — as I call it: theory of the empty set — cannot be blocked up.”

Carl Ludwig Siegel (1896–1981) German mathematician

in a 1964 letter to L. J. Mordell as quoted by [C. S. Yogananda, The Life and Times of Bourbaki, June 2015, Resonance, 556–559, http://www.ias.ac.in/article/fulltext/reso/020/06/0556-0559] (quote from p. 558)

Melissus of Samos photo

“Nor is anything empty: For what is empty is nothing. What is nothing cannot be.Nor does it move; for it has nowhere to betake itself to, but is full. For if there were aught empty, it would betake itself to the empty. But, since there is naught empty, it has nowhere to betake itself to.”

Melissus of Samos (-470–-430 BC) Eleatic philosopher

Fragments of Melissus's On Nature, Fragment 7

Heather Brooke photo

“If you believe the promise that an authoritarian state makes that if it has enough knowledge on every citizen it will keep people safe. I think that’s a false promise. It doesn’t actually happen. If that was the case then East Germany would be a really incredible place to live and in fact it wasn’t, it was really horrible, most of these places were really horrible.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/08/17/heather-brooke-data-deali_n_928985.html "Heather Brooke: Data Dealing Is A Bigger Scandal Than Phone Hacking", Interview with Dina Rickman, 17 August 2011.
Attributed, In the Media

Alfred Horsley Hinton photo

“In such a picture the artist may depart from actual fact, from what actually was, so long as he does not exceed what might have been.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Printing the picture and controlling its formation, p. 78

“The general point that a political theory is, among other things, a partisan intervention, is well taken. So question about the actual political implication of a theory cannot be excluded as, in principle, irrelevant.”

Raymond Geuss book Philosophy and Real Politics

Source: Philosophy and Real Politics (2008), Chapter 2.

Related topics