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Book: The Discovery Of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority
Quotes of Book: The Discovery Of Freedom:
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  1. Rose Wilder Lane _ The Discovery Of Freedom:

    Ask why you can't lift an innocent finger without permission, and your lack of the simplest reasoning power baffles them. One must always have a permit; how else could the authorities maintain the social order? In every instance, that will stop you. There is no other way by which Authority can maintain a social order. The tragedy of the Old World is that this only way by which Authority can maintain a social order must inevitably destroy the social order and any form of Authority that tries to maintain it. The energy of a constantly increasing number of bureaucrats has always been subtracted from productive energy in the Old World.
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  2. Rose Wilder Lane _ The Discovery Of Freedom:

    The basis of all this thinking is ignorance of creative energy; it is ignorance of the real nature of human beings; it is the ancient, pagan superstition that Authority controls a static, limited universe. This belief is at least six thousand years old. Acting upon this belief, human beings have tried every one of these ideas now advanced as revolutionary, and many more; they have tried every conceivable way of making a human world in which human energy can work at its natural job of making this earth habitable for human beings, and never in one of those centuries have they succeeded {with that pagan belief} in using their energies well enough to get them all enough to eat. Yet they keep on trying, because individuals control human energy in accordance with their religious faith, whatever it may be. And belief in Authority controlling a fixed, limited, changeless universe is the pagan religion. If this belief were true, then a human world controlled by some kind of human Authority would work. Then such a world would have worked, at least once, at least fairly well, during six thousand years of efforts to make it work. It does not work, for the same reason that a perpetual-motion machine will not work, because the attempt to make it work is based on a false belief, and not on fact.
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  3. Rose Wilder Lane _ The Discovery Of Freedom:

    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.
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  4. Rose Wilder Lane _ The Discovery Of Freedom:

    The Saracens had no use for these measurements, no reason to sail around the earth to India. They were in India. Cathay and the Spice Islands were on their doorstep. But Europeans needed a route to India, and the Crusades taught them that they did. The riches of the world were in the East, and the Saracens had them. Europeans were the Have Not nations, and they knew it.
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  5. Rose Wilder Lane _ The Discovery Of Freedom:

    Moslems had gone back to the static, changeless universe and the controlling Authority. They had escaped from the responsibility of freedom. Moslem life was stagnant for six centuries because Moslems no longer knew that individuals control themselves and are responsible for their own acts and their own lives and for the human world they make.
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  6. Rose Wilder Lane _ The Discovery Of Freedom:

    Between the 15th century and the 17th century, the Moslems forgot the God of Abraham, Christ, and Mohammed. They came to think of God as Authority, controlling men. I believe they could find no other explanation for the ruin of their world. They said it was an act of God; it was completely unreasonable, so they said that God is Unknowable. And this belief, prevailing among the millions, affected the newly-converted Turks, so that they, too, reverted to paganism. The Saracen world and the Turks who had conquered it, sank into stagnation.
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  7. Rose Wilder Lane _ The Discovery Of Freedom:

    Actually it is the way in which men always, everywhere, keep the peace, when no one of them has a recognized right to use force. Then each one feels his responsibility. This is the way Americans kept the peace on the frontier, and keep it now on fishing and hunting trips and in clubrooms.
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  8. Rose Wilder Lane _ The Discovery Of Freedom:

    Under the arcade of the market place, above the door that led to the offices of the city government, you see today a painting of Mother Ragusa, the Free City. The colors are still clear and fresh. Grouped around Mother Ragusa's knees, and equally enclosed by her arms, are children of all peoples; the Norman, the Mongol, the African, the Slav and the Levantine. Here is human equality and human brotherhood. Below the portrait stands a marble bench on which three judges sat every day, to hear and judge in public any case brought before them. They represented the Free City. They were bound to judge all men with an equal justice.
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  9. Rose Wilder Lane _ The Discovery Of Freedom:

    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.
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  10. Rose Wilder Lane _ The Discovery Of Freedom:

    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.
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  11. Rose Wilder Lane _ The Discovery Of Freedom:

    The only way to make me stand in line for half an hour to buy a spool of thread, or to make me spend six weeks in getting stamps on paper when I want to drive a car, is to use the energy of persons who otherwise would be making more thread and more cars.
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  12. Rose Wilder Lane _ The Discovery Of Freedom:

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