CARROTS & PEANUT BUTTER
TOM ROBBINS, Still Life with Woodpecker
The difference between a criminal and an outlaw is that while criminals frequently are victims, outlaws never are. Indeed, the first step toward becoming a true outlaw is the refusal to be victimized. All people who live subject to other people's laws are victims. People who break laws out of greed, frustration, or vengeance are victims. People who overturn laws in order to replace them with their own laws are victims. ( I am speaking here of revolutionaries.) We outlaws, however, live beyond the law. We don't merely live beyond the letter of the law-many businessmen, most politicians, and all cops do that-we live beyond the spirit of the law. In a sense, then, we live beyond society. Have we a common goal, that goal is to turn the tables on the 'nature' of society. When we succeed, we raise the exhilaration content of the universe. We even raise it a little bit when we fail.
When war turns whole populations into sleepwalkers, outlaws don't join forces with alarm clocks. Outlaws, like poets, rearrange the nightmare.
The trite mythos of the outlaw; the self-conscious romanticism of the outlaw; the black wardrobe of the outlaw; the fey smile of the outlaw; the tequila of the outlaw and the beans of the outlaw; respectable men sneer and say 'outlaw'; young women palpitate and say 'outlaw'. The outlaw boat sails against the flow; outlaws toilet where badgers toilet. All outlaws are photogenic. 'When freedom is outlawed, only outlaws will be free.' There are outlaw maps that lead to outlaw treasures. Unwilling to wait for mankind to improve, the outlaw lives as if that day were here. Outlaws are can openers in the supermarket of life.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI, South of No North
Like anybody can tell you, I am not a very nice man. I don't know the word.
I have always admired the villain, the outlaw, the son of a bitch.
I don't like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job.
I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways. They interest me. They are full of surprises and explosions.
I also like vile women, drunk cursing bitches with loose stockings and sloppy mascara faces
I'm more interested in perverts than saints. I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don't like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don't like to be shaped by society.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON, Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga
An outlaw can be defined as somebody who lives outside the law, beyond the law and not necessarily against it.
The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.
No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well...maybe chalk it up to forced consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten.
