“The outlaw will often wonder whether asserting the right to know, to taste, to experience, to judge is not an act of arrogance. … To become an outlaw, I must decide that my personal experience rather than the mores of the tribe is the authority upon which I will base my judgments. In a bold act of self-love and self-trust, the outlaw proclaims that individual to be higher than the universal.”

—  Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 130

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The outlaw will often wonder whether asserting the right to know, to taste, to experience, to judge is not an act of ar…" by Sam Keen?
Sam Keen photo
Sam Keen 56
author, professor, and philosopher 1931

Related quotes

Ayaan Hirsi Ali photo

“So this, in a nutshell, was my Enlightenment: free inquiry, universal education, individual freedom, the outlawing of private violence, and the protection of individual property rights.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali (1969) Dutch feminist, author

Source: 2010s, Nomad: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010), Chapter 14, “Opening the Muslim Mind: An Enlightenment Mind” (p. 212)

Ned Kelly photo

“I am a Widow's Son, outlawed and my orders must be obeyed”

Ned Kelly (1855–1880) Australian bushranger

Jerilderie Letter (1879)
Context: Neglect this and abide by the consequences, which shall be worse than the rust in the wheat of Victoria or the druth of a dry season to the grasshoppers in New South Wales I do not wish to give the order full force without giving timely warning, but I am a Widow's Son, outlawed and my orders must be obeyed.

“There is a crucial difference between the criminal and the outlaw. The criminal is a perverse rebel who acts out against the law. … The outlaw is a supranormal individual who cares about others too much to accept the limitations on eros that are imposed by normal life. Thus the outlaw question moves outside end beyond, not against the law. While the rebel is an antinomian, merely rejecting the established, the outlaw is motivated by a quest for autonomy.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 130-131

“Jazz musicians have some outlaw in them somewhere if they are serious about this music…The is no valid motivation for it other than love– outlaw motivation in a profit-motivated society.”

Mike Zwerin (1930–2010) American jazz musician

La Tristesse de Saint Louis: Swing Under the Nazis, Chapter. 4, 1985, Dictionary of Quotations, Chambers: Edinburgh, U.K, 2005, p. 937

William James photo

“I look forward to a future when acts of war shall be formally outlawed as between civilized peoples.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

1900s, The Moral Equivalent of War (1906)
Context: I look forward to a future when acts of war shall be formally outlawed as between civilized peoples.
All these beliefs of mine put me firmly into the anti-military party. But I do not believe that peace either ought to be or will be permanent on this globe, unless the states, pacifically organized, preserve some of the old elements of army-discipline. A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy. In the more or less socialistic future toward which mankind seems drifting we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings.

“The outlaw uses the knife to separate the persona from the self. The outlaw uses the warrior’s sword to cut through his own character armor to destroy the defense mechanisms that have kept him imprisoned within the citadel of personality and role.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 132

Norman Mailer photo

“I felt something shift to murder in me. I felt … that I was an outlaw, a psychic outlaw, and I liked it.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

His reaction to a publisher's rejection of The Deer Park because of six "salacious lines" he would not remove, as quoted in The New York Times (21 July 1985)

“Some poets are more deeply involved than others in the raw experience which lies behind the poem and for them the act of composition is an act of self exploration with the definite goal of enlightenment rather than the ideally depersonalized construction of a beautiful and autonomous object.”

Vernon Scannell (1922–2007) British boxer and poet

Not Without Glory, 1976

Phil Zimmermann photo

“If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy.”

Phil Zimmermann (1954) creator of Pretty Good Privacy

Why I Wrote PGP http://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html, Part of the original 1991 PGP User's Guide (updated in 1999)

“If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) (1990)

Related topics