"Power gradually extirpates from the mind
every humane and gentle virtue."

Edmund Burke

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"Power intoxicates men.
It is never voluntarily surrendered.
It must be taken from them."

James. F. Byrnes

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"The limits of tyrants
are prescribed by the endurance
of those whom they suppress."

Frederick Douglass

	Treatise Of An American Outlaw 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. We outlaws, however, live beyond the law. We don't merely live beyond the letter of the law, 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. I love the trite mythos of the outlaw. I love the self-conscious romanticism of the outlaw. I love the black wardrobe of the outlaw. I love the fey smile of the outlaw. I love the pot of the outlaw and the beans of the outlaw. I love the way respectable men sneer and say "outlaw." I love the way young women palpitate and say "outlaw." The outlaw boat sails against the flow, and I love it. Outlaws toilet where badgers toilet, and I love it. All outlaws are photogenic, and I love that. "When freedom is outlawed, only outlaws will be free": that's a graffito seen in Anacortes, and I love that. There are outlaw maps that lead to outlaw treasures, and I love those maps especially. Unwilling to wait for mankind to improve, the outlaw lives as if that day were here, and I love that most of all. Criminals, because they're plagued with guilt, often will surrender and go quietly. Outlaws, because they're pure, never will.

Stolen from Tom Robbins (Still Life With Woodpecker)

"I hold a little rebellion now and then
is a good thing,
and as necessary in the political world
as storms in the physical."

Thomas Jefferson

"All men recognize the right of revolution that is,
the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist,
the government with its tyranny or its efficiency
are great and unendurable."

Henry David Thoreau

"Prudence, indeed, will dictate
that Governments long established
should not be changed for light and transcient Causes,
and accordingly all Experience hath shewn,
that Mankind are more disposed to suffer
while Evils are sufferable,
than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms
to which they are accustomed.

But when a long train of Abuses and Usurpations,
pursuing invariably the same Object,
evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism,
it is their right, it is their duty,
to throw off such Government,
and to provide new guards for their future Security."

Declaration of Independence

"Liberty Lives in the hearts of all men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it." Learned Hand "Liberty does not exist, my fellow citizens, in the mere declaration of the rights of man. It consists in the translation of those declarations into definite actions." Woodrow Wilson

"With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments, where they will certainly be lost." William Loyd Garrison "Extremism in the defense of Liberty is no vice. And . . . moderation in the pursuit of Justice is no virtue." Barry Goldwater

. . . "for the support of this Declaration (the Declaration of Independence), with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor."

EPILOGUE