"Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively."
— Dalai Lama XIV

"I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do."
— Robert A. Heinlein

"The thing that is most hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most wind up in parentheses."
— John Irving

"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
— Henry David Thoreau

"I learned the bad guys are not always bad, the good guys are not always good, and to quote Captain Barbossa, the parameters are like rules, mostly guidelines. And that it takes a little bit of bad boy to fight the evil in the world.
--Terri Mitchell"
— Sherrilyn Kenyon (Phantom in the Night)

"Rules and responsibilities: these are the ties that bind us. We do what we do, because of who we are. If we did otherwise, we would not be ourselves. I will do what I have to do. And I will do what I must."
— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman: Book of Dreams)

"He smiles at me, and I am suddenly seventeen again - the year I realize that love doesn't follow the rules, the year I understood that nothing is worth having so much as something unattainable"
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"The hell with the rules. If it sounds right, then it is."
— Eddie Van Halen

"Never sleep with a lady only once, especially in the case of an older lady.
-'Rhett "
— Rowena Cherry (Knight's Fork)

"She'd even violated the only sensible rule of dieting she'd ever run across, the sage advice of the Muppets' Miss Piggy, who recommended never eating anything bigger than your head."
— Susan Donovan (He Loves Lucy)

"The propitious smiles of heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregard the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained."

Inaugural address 1789"
— George Washington

"It was one of the many rules in the kennel, rules that didn't always make sense, or even seem important, until some situation drew the lesson out."
— David Wroblewski (The Story of Edgar Sawtelle)

"The golden rule is that there are no golden rules."
— George Bernard Shaw

"You are remembered for the rules you break."
— Douglas MacArthur

"Society has good reason to fear the Radical. Every shaking advance of mankind toward equality and justice has come from the Radical. He hits, he hurts, he is dangerous. Conservative interests know that while Liberals are most adept at breaking their own necks with their tongues, Radicals are most adept at breaking the necks of Conservatives."
— Saul Alinsky

"Don't play any game if you don't understand the rules no matter how nice winners trophy looks like"
— Sonja Smolec

"I believe in rules. Sure I do. If there weren't any rules, how could you break them?"
— Leo Duracher

"How dreadful...to be caught up in a game and have no idea of the rules."
— Caroline Stevermer (Sorcery and Cecelia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot: Being the Correspondence of Two Young Ladies of Quality Regarding Various Magical Scandals in London and the Country)

"Never sleep with a lady only once, especially in the case of an older lady.
"
— Rhett, Knight’s Fork by Rowena Cherry

"live well
love much
laugh often"
— my cup

"It (trying to keep the law) grants you the power to judge others and feel superior to them. You believe you are living to a higher standard than those you judge. Enforcing rules, especially in its more subtle expressions like responsibility and expectation, is a vain attempt to create certainly out of uncertainty. And contrary to what you might think, I have a great fondness for uncertainty. Rules cannot bring freedom; they only have the power to accuse. "
— William P. Young (The Shack)

"It is often said that God is a comedian playing for an audience too afraid to laugh."
— Martin Spanjers

"We all live inside the terrible engine of authority, and it grinds and shrieks and burns so that no one will say: lines on maps are silly."
— Catherynne M. Valente (The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making)