33 quotes
The question is whether personal freedom is worth the terrible effort, the never-lifted burden and risks of self-reliance.
History is nothing whatever but a record of what living persons have done in the past.
Give Me Liberty (1936)
Anarchy is absence of earthly Authority over human beings, by definition and etymology; so I am an anarchist.
The Lady and The Tycoon: Letters of Rose Wilder Lane and Jasper Crane (1973)
Men are alive on this earth, only because the imperative human desire is to attack the enemies of human life.
Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority (1943)
To believe that any action based on an ignorance of fact can possibly succeed, is to abandon the use of reason.
Give Me Liberty (1936)
The Democratic Party is now a political mechanism having a genuine political principle: national socialism.
Give Me Liberty (1936)
It is obvious that by robbing others, he robs himself, because obviously, if ALL human beings tried to live by not producing but stealing goods from others, none could survive beyond a limited time.
The Lady and The Tycoon: Letters of Rose Wilder Lane and Jasper Crane (1973)
Writing fiction is … an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.
Old Home Town (1935)
A republic is not possible in the Soviet Union because the aim of its rulers is an economic aim. Economic power differs from political power.
Give Me Liberty (1936)
In actual fact, the population of a country is a multitude of diverse human beings with an infinite variety of purposes and desires and fluctuating wills.
Give Me Liberty (1936)
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.
Give Me Liberty (1936)
Liberty is inalienable; as I can not transfer my life to anyone else, I can not transfer my liberty, my control of my life-energy, to anyone else.
Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority (1943)
No jailer can compel any prisoner to speak or act against that prisoner's will, but chains can prevent his acting, and a gag can prevent his speaking.
Give Me Liberty (1936)
This is the nature of human energy; individuals generate it, and control it. Each person is self-controlling, and therefore responsible for his acts. Every human being, by his nature, is free.
Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority (1943)
What I can't understand is, how can anybody figure now that the government can support us, when we support the government.
Give Me Liberty (1936)
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.
The first twenty years of my life were wasted...I didn't fit my environment, and I didn't know any other.
Diary (1927)
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.
Old Home Town (1935)
Public debt is a new problem for Americans; a century ago, no one imagined it. Congress then did not know what to do with all the surplus money in the Treasury, and finally returned it to the States.
Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority (1943)
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.
Give Me Liberty (1936)