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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. – Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker @Library

"Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible." – C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity @Library

“I now give you my word of honor,” he went on, “that the picture your city owns shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal—the ‘I am’ to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us—in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.” – Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions @Library

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It's time to pick your next book: @Library

"Human beings are funny. They long to be with the person they love but refuse to admit openly. Some are afraid to show even the slightest sign of affection because of fear. Fear that their feelings may not be recognized, or even worse, returned. But one thing about human beings puzzles me the most: their conscious effort to be connected with the object of their affection even if it kills them slowly within. It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love. Most people do not really want love because love involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility. Whoever loves becomes humble; those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism. Ultimately, love demands vulnerability, and it's in that vulnerability that we find our truest selves." – Sigmund Freud @Library

4 biographies everyone should read: @Library

What they do not comprehend is man's helplessness. I am weak, small, of no consequence to the universe. It does not notice me; I live on unseen. But why is that bad? Isn't it that way? Whom the gods notice they destroy. Be small… and you will escape the jealousy of the great. – Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle @Library

10 books to think like a strategic genius: 1) The Art of War by Sun Tzu 2) On Grand Strategy by John Lewis Gaddis 3) The Art of Action by Stephen Bungay 4) Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace by Edward Luttwak 5) Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt 6) The Strategy of Conflict by Thomas Schelling 7) The Art of Strategy by Avinash Dixit & Barry Nalebuff 8) The Dictator's Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita & Alastair Smith 9) 7 Powers by Hamilton Helmer 10) Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman @Library

"There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that arises in any mind, which cannot be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and explain it for thirty-five years. Something always remains unexpressed, something that remains in the mind forever and with which one dies, without having communicated it to anyone." – Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot @Library

9 books to increase your lifespan: @Library

Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him, out of two evils to choose the least. Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others. – Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776) @Library

3 books to understand why you're always tired: @Library

Rule 12: Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street. - 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson @Library

6 books every aspiring founder should read: 1. Zero to One by Peter Thiel 2. The Lean Startup by Eric Ries 3. The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick 4. Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston 5. Disciplined Entrepreneurship by Bill Aulet 6. The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz @Library

“I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.” – Sylvia Plath @Library

3 books to reclaim your attention span: @Library

"We hit and we kept on hitting; we were allowed to be what we were, frightened and vengeful — little animals, clawing at what we needed." – Justin Torres, We the Animals @Library

20 books to become a multidisciplinary thinker: @Library

“Why do we care about singers? Wherein lies the power of songs? Maybe it derives from the sheer strangeness of there being singing in the world. The note, the scale, the chord; melodies, harmonies, arrangements; symphonies, ragas, chinese operas, jazz, the blues: that such things should exist, that we should have discovered the magical intervals and distances that yield the poor cluster of notes, all within the span of a human hand from which we can build our cathedrals of sound, is alchemical a mystery as mathematics, or wine, or love. Maybe the birds taught us. Maybe not. Maybe we are just creatures in search of exaltation. We don't have much of it. Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many painful ways deficient. Song turns them into something else. Song shows us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us our selves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world.” – Salman Rushdie @Library