Rose Wilder Lane Quotes

The historical novelty of the Soviet government was its motive. Other governments have existed to keep peace among their subjects, or to amass money from them, or to use them in trade and war for the glory of the men governing them. But the Soviet government exists to do good to its people, whether they like it or not…To that end they have suppressed personal freedom; freedom of movement, of choice of work, freedom of self-expression in ways of life, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience.

I am FOR any and every way of diminishing the size, the activity, the extent of Government per se, and all respect for Government, to the eventual end of eliminating Government totally. Anarchy is absence of earthly Authority over human beings, by definition and etymology; so I am an anarchist.

I do not see how a British switch from alliance with Stalin to alliance with Hitler can be any tragic defeat for ‘democracy.’ It is a smashing blow to a communist state and to communists as a party and as an international conspiracy—a blow to conspiracy because it will create further dissension in it. But if this alliance is a triumph for Fascism, then the British alliance with the Czar was a triumph for Czarism, and the one with Stalin was a triumph for communism.

I do not think that any honesty is involved in paying taxes. Taxation is plain armed robbery; tax‐collectors are armed robbers. I will save my property from them in any way that I think I can get away with. If you wake in the night with a flashlight shining in your face and a masked man with a gun ordering you to tell him where your money is, do you feel that you’re morally obliged to tell him the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? I think you might. I don’t. I will try to get out of that predicament with as little loss as possible. In regard to taxes, this means taking advantage of every legality that any attorney can find in the tax ‘laws’ so called, and regulations. I have no scruples about this whatever, anything that I want to do with my money, and that I can in any way slip under any legality so that the robbers won’t find it and rob me of some of it, I do. They make the legalities, trying to be smart about who gets how much of my property; and to keep as much as possible of my own, I’ll outsmart them if I can.

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.

My attachment to these United States is wholly, entirely, absolutely The Revolution, the real world Revolution, which men began here and which has—so to speak—a foothold on earth here. If reactionaries succeed in destroying the revolutionary structure of social and political human life here, I care no more about this continent than about any other. If I lived long enough I would find and join the revival of the Revolution wherever it might be, in Africa or Asia or Europe, the Arctic or Antarctic. And let this country go with all the other regimes that collectivism has wrecked and eliminated since history began. So much for patriotism, mine.

Samuel Grafton asked on the radio some weeks ago, for a listeners’ vote on the question; do you want the benefits of Social Security extended to those now excluded from them? Of course, I knew what the announced results would be, but just for shucks… I sent him a postcard saying ‘no’. I signed it Mrs. C. G. Lane (my name) for obvious reasons. Last Saturday, I’m peacefully digging dandelions out of my lawn with a paring knife, when the State Police arrive, in full uniform, complete with gun, and stern and overpowering as hell. The FBI, if you please, is investigating the subversive activities of Mrs. C. G. Lane. It is true that I sent this postcard? (Copy held accusingly before my eyes.) Is it true that I oppose Social Security? What (in effect) do I mean by it? My sense of proportion completely failed; I rose up in fury, and it’s really too bad that only the dandelions heard me. The State Police, really very decent young fellows, tried to explain that they didn’t really mean anything by it, that I should give them credit for coming to me instead of going around collecting evidence against me from the neighbors, and that of course if I’m Rose Wilder Lane—all of which only made me madder, naturally.

This rejection of one's self as an individual was, I knew, the spirit animating the members of the Communist Party. I heard that it was the spirit beginning to animate Russia. It was the spirit of Fascism, the spirit that indubitably did revive Italy. Scores, hundreds of the smallest incidents revealed it.

History is nothing whatever but a record of what living persons have done in the past.

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.

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

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.

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.

More and more southerners were seeing this fact and trying to get rid of their slaves; there were all kinds of plans for doing this. So many simply freed their slaves that most, if not all, southern legislatures passed Acts forbidding this—Acts intended to compel slave-owners to continue to bear their responsibility for their slave-property, and to prevent an increase of the numbers of untrained, uncontrolled, unfed and unsheltered person at large in those states. To evade these laws slave-owners moved temporarily into ‘free’ territory, freed their salves there, and returned. So laws were passed forbidding this. And laws forbidding such freed slaves to return to the slave States, on penalty arrest, punishment and sale.

For 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. I am not an alarmist; that is plain fact.