Rose Wilder Lane

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"Men are alive on this earth, only because the imperative human desire is to attack the enemies of human life."