Rose Wilder Lane Quotes
-
The first twenty years of my life were wasted. I didn't fit my environment, and I didn't know any other.
→ -
An Old World revolution is only a movement around a motionless center; it never breaks out of the circle. Firm in the center is belief in Authority.
→ -
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.
→ -
I ask myself, 'why am I so lazy?' and am too lazy to reply.
→ -
The prairies were dust. Day after day, summer after summer, the scorching winds blew the dust and the sun was brassy in a yellow sky. Crop after crop failed. Again and again the barren land must be mortgaged for taxes and food and next year's seed. The agony of hope ended when there was not harvest and no more credit, no money to pay interest and taxes; the banker took the land. Then the bank failed.
→ -
Life is a thin narrowness of taken-for-granted, a plank over a canyon in a fog.
→ -
The Democratic Party is now a political mechanism having a genuine political principle: national socialism.
→ -
Men in Government monopolize the necessary use of force; they are not using their energies productively; they are not milking cows. To get butter, they must use guns; they have nothing else to use.
→ -
I am now a fundamentalist American; give me time and I will tell you why individualism, laissez-faire and the slightly restrained anarchy of capitalism offer the best opportunities for the development of the human spirit.
→ -
Houses are the abiding joys; they are the most emotion-stirring of all things. An automobile is regarded with fond affection, a typewriter becomes the inseparable companion, clothes can stir sentimentality, and the bit of bric-a-brac is a toy one would weep to see torn away - but houses are real, deep, emotional things. How much excitement in the cutting of a window, what enormous importance in the angle of a roof!
→ -
The real protection of life and property, always and everywhere.
→ -
Writing fiction is an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.
→ -
I'm not "filled with my art". I ain't got no art. I've got only a kind of craftsman's skill, and make stories as I make biscuits or embroider underwear or wrap up packages.
→ -
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.
→ -
There is a city myth that country life was isolated and lonely; the truth is that farmers and their families then had a richer social life than they have now. They enjoyed a society organic, satisfying and whole, not mixed and thinned with the life of town, city and nation as it now is.
→ -
What I can't understand is, how can anybody figure now that the government can support us, when we support the government.
→ -
Our quilts were more than useful, they had the faint sentimentality of a pressed flower. And no more beauty. We did not value them for their appearance, but for the memories in them, for their good wearing qualities and the thrift they represented.
→ -
The need for Government is the need for force; where force is unnecessary, there is no need for Government.
→ -
A kiss without a mustache is like an egg without salt.
→ -
The longest lives are short; our work lasts longer.
→ -
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.
→ -
One thing I hate about the New Deal is that it is killing what, to me, is the American pioneering spirit. I simply do not know what to tell my own boys, leaving school and confronting this new world whose ideal is Security and whose practice is dependence upon government instead of upon one's self. All the old character-values seem simply insane from a practical point of view; the self-reliant, the independent, the courageous man is penalized from every direction.
→ -
I can imagine nothing more wonderful than always wanting to keep a man. It's this NOT wanting to keep them, and yet not quite being able to disentangle one's self, never quite having the ruthlessness to stike at the hands on the gunwale with an oar until they let go - that's the horrible thing.
→ -
Curiosity is the hunger of the human mind.
→ -
Happiness is something that comes into our lives through doors we don't even remember leaving open.
→ -
As an American I am of course fundamentally opposed to democracy and to anyone advocating or defending democracy, which in theory and practice is the basis of socialism.
→ -
As novices, we think we're entirely responsible for the way people treat us. I have long since learned that we are responsible only for the way we treat people.
→ -
Plants and animals repeat routine, but men who are not restrained will go into the future like explorers into a new country.
→ -
I am too sick to work and haven't money enough to last 2 months and pay income tax. I want to keep going but do not see quite how, and there is no alternative - rather than justify my mother's 25-year dread of my "coming back on her, sick," I must kill myself. If she has to pay funeral costs, at least she will cut them to the bone and I will not be here to endure her martyrdom and prolong it by living.
→ -
No state, no government exists. What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men.
→
Related Authors
-
Susan Wittig Albert Writer -
Laura Ingalls Wilder Writer -
Rita Mae Brown Writer -
Albert J. Nock Author -
Lysander Spooner Philosopher -
Sara Gilbert Actress -
Rhys Bowen Author -
Murray Rothbard Economist -
Melissa Gilbert Actress -
Henry Ford Industrialist -
Joanne Fluke Writer -
Anne Perry Author -
-
Lilian Jackson Braun Writer -
Maggie Gyllenhaal Actress -
M.C. Beaton Writer -
Rob Lowe Film actor -
Melissa Sue Anderson Film actress -
Michael Landon Actor -
Ayn Rand Novelist