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

How thoroughly have you studied compulsory insurance in Germany? And why do you believe that it will work here otherwise than it worked there? I would really like to know. My own opinions haven’t ripened yet. So far, I am opposed to so-called ‘Social Security’ principally because I am opposed to tyranny; I think it is tyranny to take my money, money earned by my labor, and to spend it for me—in any way whatever—instead of allowing me to send it for myself. But so far as I have learned, and thought, about this use of tyranny in Germany since Bismarck established it, I’m inclined to believe that it can’t work otherwise than as disastrously as it worked there.

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.

We would learn more by looking at America. Oddly enough, statistics appear only in times of agitation and distress. Their function would appear to be that of omens of worse to come. We seem to have a morbid taste for them, like that of children for ghost stories that raise the hair. The American air has not been so full of fragmentary statistics since the Panic of 1893. I read again, for instance, that less than 10 per cent of our population own more than 90 per cent of the wealth… I read also that a hundred years ago 80 per cent of our population owned property and that today the percentage is 23.