Justice & Law Quote by Bill Mauldin

A cartoonist calling himself "a fugitive from the law of averages" is a sly confession: he knows he has beaten the statistical story we tell ourselves to stay calm. The phrase "law of averages" has the reassuring thud of common sense, the idea that luck evens out, that the world has a built-in fairness if you just wait long enough. Mauldin flips it into a police procedural. If averages are the law, then being consistently unlucky - or consistently lucky - becomes a kind of crime, an ongoing act of noncompliance with what reality is supposed to do.

The joke lands because it treats probability like morality. "Fugitive" implies pursuit, guilt, and fatigue; it turns randomness into an authority with a badge, and the speaker into someone always looking over his shoulder for the moment the universe catches up and collects its debt. That's the subtext: success can feel less like triumph than like an overdue bill. Even good fortune carries paranoia, because "average" is imagined as destiny.

Mauldin's context sharpens the line. He made his name in wartime, drawing weary infantrymen and puncturing heroic narratives with mud-level truth. In that world, survival itself can feel like an error in the math. The quip reads as veteran humor: dry, defensive, and oddly tender. It refuses sentimentality while admitting fear. He's not boasting about exceptionalism; he's wary of it, as if being spared, noticed, or praised is just another way of being singled out - and singled out is dangerous.