Quotes from Hunter S. Thompson

It is a straight shot from Cancun to Havana, sixty-six minutes by jet plane across the Gulf of Mexico with a Soviet-blonde stewardess serving free rum and synthetic ham and cheese sandwiches.

You're going to need plenty of legal advice before this thing is over. And my first advice is that you should rent a very fast car with no top and get the hell out of L.A. for at least forty-eight hours. This blows my weekend, because naturally I'll have to go with you—and we'll have to arm ourselves.

Now they looked like somebody had just sprayed their table with shit-mist. Nobody said a word. They ate quickly, and left without tipping. So

Mother of babbling god!" I muttered. The word "deadline" caused my brain to seize up momentarily. Deadline? Yes. Tomorrow morning, about 15 more hours… .

Like most of the others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser.

America has been breeding mass anomie since the end of World War II. It is not a political thing, but the sense of new realities, of urgency, anger and sometimes desperation in a society where even the highest authorities seem to be grasping at straws.

This guy is the real thing," one of them said. "I never cared anything about politics before, but Wallace ain't the same as the others. He don't sneak around the bush. He just comes right out and says it.

The difference between the student radicals and the Hell's Angels is that the students are rebelling against the past, while the Angels are fighting the future

ignored the Wallace rallies that, night after night, packed halls in every corner of the state. That was all Wallace did—except for a few TV spots—and every one of his rallies attracted more people than the halls could hold.

The Air Force has never valued a sense of humor in its career men, and in high-risk fields like flight testing, a sense of the absurd will cripple a man's future just as surely as an LSD habit.

Anybody who doubts the Wallace appeal should go out and catch his act sometime. He jerked this crowd in Serb Hall around like he had them all on wires. They were laughing, shouting, whacking each other on the back… it was a flat-out fire & brimstone performance.

We might get our country back," said the construction man, stirred. "I feel like I lost it. I feel like I been lost in it all this time." "I've been lost too," said the gas-station operator. "I've been trying to find somebody I can understand to vote for.

Secondly, instead of competing with Muskie and Humphrey, I was then competing with Nixon, the author of the Southern strategy and the guy who hammered hard against those who were dissenters on the war and hammered on amnesty and busing and those things, so that it was a different type of competition than I had with Muskie and Humphrey in Wisconsin.

This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling conciousness expansion without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously. After West Point and the Priesthood, LSD must have seemed entirely logical to him... but there is not much satisfaction in knowing that he blew it very badly for himself, because he took too many others down with him.

I have seen them try to amuse an outsider by telling stories which they consider very funny—but which generate fear and queasiness in a listener whose sense of humor has a different kind of filter.

Some of the outlaws understand this communications gap, but most are puzzled and insulted to hear that "normal people" consider them horrible.

What election?" he asked. "Never mind," I said. "I was only kidding." One

He Smiled. A great town, that Vegas. You'll have good luck there; you're they type. I know, I said. I'm a Triple Scorpio.

Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. —John Milton, Paradise Lost

And indeed, that IS the question: whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal. It is a choice we must all make consciously or unconsciously at one time in our lives. So few people understand this! Think of any decision you've ever made which had a bearing on your future: I may be wrong, but I don't see how it could have been anything but a choice however indirect — between the two things I've mentioned: the floating or the swimming.

Sympathy? Not for me. No mercy for a criminal freak in Las Vegas. This place is like the Army: the shark ethic prevails - eat the wounded. In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.

In a world increasingly geared to specialists, technicians and fantastically complicated machinery, the Hell's Angels are obvious losers and it bugs them. But instead of submitting quietly to their collective fate, they have made it the basis of a full-time social vendetta. They don't expect to win anything, but on the other hand, they have nothing to lose.

bush-league sex compared to L.A.; pasties here —total naked public humping in L.A. . . . Las Vegas is a society of armed masturbators/gambling is the kicker here/sex is extra/weird trip for high rollers . . . house-whores for winners, hand jobs for the bad luck crowd.

I got a lady who liked George because she said he knew how to tie his tie right," said the black girl. "Gloria Steinem showed him how to tie it. You should have seen how he tied it before that.