I am a contributing creator of American civilization; it does not create me. I control the stem of this civilization that is within my reach; it does… - Rose Wilder Lane

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.

The Republican Party remains a political mechanism with no political principle. It does not stand for American individualism. Its leaders continue to play the 70-year-old American professional sport of vote-getting, called politics.

They were the final blow that brought down that whole planned structure. The great English reform movement of the 19th century consisted wholly in repealing laws. There was nothing constructive in it; it was wholly destructive. It was a destruction of Government's interference with human affairs, a destruction of the so-called ‘protection’ that is actually a restriction of the exercise of natural human rights. In that mid-19th-century period of the greatest individual freedom that Englishmen have ever known, they made the prosperity and power of the British Empire during Victoria's long and peaceful reign. And to that freedom, and prosperity and power and peace, the American clipper ship contributed more than any other one thing.