Top 40 Rose Wilder Lane Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Curiosity is the hunger of the human mind.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

2. “All men are brothers and each man is free.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

3. “Happiness is something that comes into our lives through doors we don’t even remember leaving open.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

4. “What I can’t understand is, how can anybody figure now that the government can support us, when we support the government.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

5. “I ask myself, ‘why am I so lazy?’ and am too lazy to reply.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

6. “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.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

7. “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.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

8. “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.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

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

— Rose Wilder Lane

10. “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.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

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

— Rose Wilder Lane

12. “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.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

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

— Rose Wilder Lane

14. “Yet twenty-two hundred years ago, there were scientists. Before Rome was an outlaw’s camp in the far west, Aristotle was saying, “If a man grasps truths that can not be other than they are, in the way in which he grasps the definitions through which demonstrations take place, he will not have opinion, but knowledge.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

15. “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.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

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

— Rose Wilder Lane

17. “A kiss without a mustache is like an egg without salt.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

18. “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.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

19. “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.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

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

— Rose Wilder Lane

21. “Constant repetition dulls receptivity...”

— Rose Wilder Lane

22. “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.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

23. “Living is fighting for life, and when anyone does not know this fact, someone else is doing his fighting for him.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

24. “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.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

25. “Indeed, nothing but smuggling kept the poor from starving to death under that Government monopoly, benevolently planned for their good.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

26. “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.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

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

— Rose Wilder Lane

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

— Rose Wilder Lane

29. “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.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

30. “It is precisely democracy which is destroying the American political structure, American law, and the American economy.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

31. “You must take into account the actual distinction between truth and fact. It is beyond all human power to tell all the facts. Your whole lifetime spent at nothing else would not tell all the facts of one morning in your life, just any ordinary morning when you get up, dress, get breakfast and wash the dishes. Facts are infinite in number. The truth is a meaning underlying them; you tell the truth by selecting the facts to illustrate it.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

32. “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.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

33. “The longest lives are short; our work lasts longer.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

34. “So long as any large group of persons, anywhere on this earth, believe the ancient superstition that some Authority is responsible for their welfare, they will set up some image of that Authority and try to obey it. And the result will be poverty and war.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

35. “The real protection of life and property, always and everywhere.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

36. “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.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

37. “Being absolute, and maintained by police force, a Government monopoly need not please its customers.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

38. “The fact is that nothing but human energy working productively can produce any of the necessities of human life, any human living conditions.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

39. “A “planned economy” destroys Government because when men use force in an attempt to control productive energies, they have no means of knowing real costs, and these costs automatically increase at an increasing rate until the people can no longer pay them.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

40. “In communism, the men who establish the commune plan its economy.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

41. “No one who sees the plain fact that all moral and spiritual values of human life are in the individual, can possibly see any spiritual value in war. War comes from the individual’s ignorance of his own nature, from his placing responsibility for the moral values of his own life in a fantasy, in a pagan god which he imagines exists outside himself and superior to him and controlling him – an Immortal Italy, a German Race, a Nation, a State.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

42. “All Spanish intellectuals burst into one great song of joy and hope. Now Spain was clean. Now every Spaniard was wholly obedient to Church and King. Alone of all European countries, Spain was now one united mass of loyal men, believing and acting as one being. Every thinker and poet in Spain celebrated in book and song this glorious event, this blessed time, the dawn of Spain’s Golden Age. It was the end of Spain.”

— Rose Wilder Lane