Rules are the difference between us and the scavengers and marauders out there. Just because we decided not to live under the town’s regulations, it doesn’t mean we want anarchy.

Karen Traviss, The Best of Us [Amazon, Bookshop]

Hermetic quote Taviss The Best of Us rules difference between us and scavengers and marauders decided live under regulations want anarchy

Consider also:

  1. “Hackers, in fiction, are the trickster-gods of the realm of computing. They go where they’re not supposed to, steal anything that isn’t nailed down (or rather, written down in ink on parchment with a quill plucked from a white goose), and boast about it.”
  2. “he found it pleasant to realize that the serene purpose of Shangri-La could embrace an infinitude of odd and apparently trivial employments, for he had always had a taste for such things himself. In fact, when he regarded his past, he saw it strewn with images of tasks too vagrant or too taxing ever to have been accomplished; but now they were all possible, even in a mood of idleness.”
  3. The Dark Rites of Cthulhu
  4. “rules were against rights and rights against rules, and a ghost in the fire was a ghost in the street, and the thing that had been was the thing that was to be and it was coming, was coming; what was coming; what but herself?”
  5. “the way to beat back the darkness and the danger is to be more yourself, to break more soul-squashing rules, to be as queer as you need to be. The heroes of horror stories are often the oddballs and the weirdos”