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. - Rose Wilder Lane

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.

The words we use are the most clumsy symbols for meanings, and to suppose that such words as ‘war,’ ‘glory,’ ‘justice,’ ‘liberty,’ ‘home,’ mean the same in two languages, is an error.

So far as is discernible to me, capitalism has no alter-ego, strictly speaking. In theory, capitalism is the economics of a society of free individuals. It rests upon the nature of man; this natural being, that each person is a source of human energy, a dynamo creating life energy, and self-controlling in action… I do not see how there can be an ‘alter-ego’ to this basic reality. One might as well say that there is an alter-ego to the fact that the earth is not flat.