Top 45 Quotes & Sayings by Rose Wilder Lane

Writing fiction is... an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.

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.

Making the best of things is... a damn poor way of dealing with them. My whole life has been a series of escapes from that quicksand.

The need for Government is the need for force; where force is unnecessary, there is no need for Government.

The real protection of life and property, always and everywhere.

I came out of the Soviet Union no longer a communist, because I believed in personal freedom.

I ask myself, 'why am I so lazy?' and am too lazy to reply.

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.

The first twenty years of my life were wasted. I didn't fit my environment, and I didn't know any other.

We are never aware of the present; each instant of living becomes perceptible only when it is past, so that in a sense we do not live at all, but only remember living.

Nothing whatever but the constitutional law, the political structure, of these United States protects any American from arbitrary seizure of his property and his person, from the Gestapo and the Storm Troops, from the concentration camp, the torture chamber, the revolver at the back of his neck in a cellar.

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

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.

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.

Life is a thin narrowness of taken-for-granted, a plank over a canyon in a fog.

All men are brothers and each man is free.

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.

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.

The Democratic Party is now a political mechanism having a genuine political principle: national socialism.

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.

Making the best of things is a damn poor way of dealing with them. My life has been a series of escapes from that quicksand.

Curiosity is the hunger of the human mind.

Writing fiction is an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.

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.

Happiness is something that comes into our lives through doors we don't even remember leaving open.

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

Even the street, the sunshine, the very air had a special Sunday quality. We walked differently on Sundays, with greater propriety and stateliness. Greetings were more formal, more subdued, voices more meticulously polite. Everything was so smooth, bland, polished. And genuinely so, because this was Sunday. In church the rustling and the stillness were alike pervaded with the knowledge that all was for the best. Propriety ruled the universe. God was in His Heaven, and we were in our Sunday clothes.

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.

no one in a group of three is the same person he (she, it) is in a group of two. No more than he is the same in a group of two as he is alone.

The longest lives are short; our work lasts longer.

It was not seen that woman's place was in the home until she began to go out of it; the statement was a reply to an unspoken challenge, it was attempted resistance to irresistible change.

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

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.

Plants and animals repeat routine, but men who are not restrained will go into the future like explorers into a new country.

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!

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.

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.

Constant repetition dulls receptivity.

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.

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.

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.

Anyone who says that economic security is a human right, has been to much babied. While he babbles, other men are risking and losing their lives to protect him. They are fighting the sea, fighting the land, fighting disease and insects and weather and space and time, for him, while he chatters that all men have a right to security and that some pagan god—Society, The State, The Government, The Commune—must give it to them. Let the fighting men stop fighting this inhuman earth for one hour, and he will learn how much security there is.

A kiss without a mustache is like an egg without salt.

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.

I somehow always have this idea that as soon as I can get through this work that's piled up ahead of me, I'll really write a beautiful thing. But I never do. I always have the idea that someday, somehow, I'll be living a beautiful life.