"I'm not givin' in an inch to fear."
— David Crosby

"Is that all there is?"
— Jerry Leiber, music by Mike Stoller

"Once upon a time there were four little Rabbits, and their names were--Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter. "
— Beatrix Potter

"They told me to take a streetcar named 'Desire,' transfer to one called 'Cemetery,' ride six blocks and get off at Elysian Fields."
— Blanche DuBois

"I think I can. I think I can. I think I can. I know I can."
— Little Engine That Could

"It's all God's will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle."
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

"We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom."
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

"Three little kittens, they lost their mittens,
And they began to cry,
Oh, mother dear, we sadly fear
That we have lost our mittens.

What! Lost your mittens, you naughty kittens!
Then you shall have no pie."
— Traditional

"Only poor men get hanged."
— G.K. Chesterton

"There was a trout."
— Ernest Hemingway

"Oh, Jake," Brett said, "we could have had such a damned good time together."..."Yes." I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?"
— Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises)

"Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once. "
— William Faulkner

"I'm a born-again atheist."
— Gore Vidal

"Write something, even if it's just a suicide note. "
— Gore Vidal

"Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment."
— Norman Mailer

"Every moment of one’s existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.
"
— Norman Mailer

"One thing I've learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don't feel it; there's probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that."
— Norman Mailer

"Kirpal’s left hand swoops down and catches the dropped fork an inch from the floor and gently passes it into the fingers of his daughter, a wrinkle at the edge of his eyes behind his spectacles."
— Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient)

"I understand that fear is my friend, but not always. Never turn your back on Fear. It should always be in front of you, like a thing that might have to be killed. My father taught me that, along with a few other things that have kept my life interesting."
— Hunter S. Thompson (Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century)

"Some people will tell you that slow is good – but I’m here to tell you that fast is better. I’ve always believed this, in spite of the trouble it’s caused me. Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba…"
— Hunter S. Thompson (Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century)

"Fear is a healthy instinct, not a sign of weakness. It is a natural self-defense mechanism that is common to felines, wolves, hyenas, and most humans. Even fruit bats know fear, and I salute them for it. If you think the world is weird now, imagine how weird it would be if wild beasts had no fear."
— Hunter S. Thompson (Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century)

"If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin."
— Hunter S. Thompson (Where Were You When the Fun Stopped)

"God's mercy on you degenerate swine."
— Hunter S. Thompson

"I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. "
— Hunter S. Thompson

"There may be flies on you and me, but there are no flies on Jesus."
— Hunter S. Thompson

"I don't mean to say that I'm about to state my credo here on this page, but merely to affirm, sincerely for the first time in my life, my belief in man as an individual and independent entity. Certainly not independence in the everyday sense of the word, but pertaining to a freedom and mobility of thought that few people are able - or even have the courage - to achieve."
— Hunter S. Thompson (Kingdom of Fear)

"Sane is rich and powerful. Insane is wrong and poor and weak. The rich are free, the poor are put in cages. Res Ipsa Loquitur, amen. Mahalo."
— Hunter S. Thompson (Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century)

"We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold."
— Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream)

"Hallucinations are bad enough. But after awhile you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing. But nobody can handle that other trip-the possibility that any freak with $1.98 can walk into the Circus-Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs."
— Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream)

"I blew the horn a few times, hoping to call up an iguana. Get the buggers moving. They were out there, I knew, in that goddamn sea of cactus--hunkered down, barely breathing, and every one of the stinking little bastards was loaded with deadly poison."
— Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream)

""We came out here to find the American Dream, and now that we're right in the vortex you want to quit ... You must realize that we've found the main nerve."

"I know," he said. "That's what gives me the Fear.'"
— Hunter S. Thompson

"We can't stop here, this is bat country!"
— Hunter S. Thompson

""Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.""
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

"For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled. "
— Hunter S. Thompson

"It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top. "
— Hunter S. Thompson

"We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark -- the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."
— Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream)

"Summer has never been the same since the 2000 Presidential Election, when we still seemed to be a prosperous nation at peace with the world, more or less. Two summers later we were a dead-broke nation at war with all but three or four countries in the world, and three of those don't count. Spain and Italy were flummoxed and and England has allowed itself to be taken over by and stigmatized by some corrupt little shyster who enjoys his slimy role as a pimp and a prostitute all at once--selling a once-proud nation of independent-thinking people down the river and into a deadly swamp of slavery to the pimps who love Jesus and George Bush and the war-crazed U.S. Pentagon."
— Hunter S. Thompson (Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness Modern History from the Sports Desk)

"Freedom is something that dies unless it's used."
— Hunter S. Thompson

"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."
— Hunter S. Thompson

"Poor bastard. Wait 'till he sees the bats. "
— Hunter S. Thompson

"If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism."
— Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72)

"I felt a little guilty about jangling the poor bugger's brains with that evil fantasy. But what the hell? Anybody who wanders around the world saying, "Hell yes, I'm from Texas," deserves whatever happens to him."
— Hunter S. Thompson (The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time)

"People who claim to know jackrabbits will tell you they are primarily motivated by Fear, Stupidity, and Craziness. But I have spent enough time in jack rabbit country to know that most of them lead pretty dull lives; they are bored with their daily routines: eat, fuck, sleep, hop around a bush now and then....No wonder some of them drift over the line into cheap thrills once in a while; there has to be a powerful adrenalin rush in crouching by the side of a road, waiting for the next set of headlights to come along, then streaking out of the bushes with split-second timing and making it across to the other side just inches in front of the speeding front wheels"
— Hunter S. Thompson

"Yesterday's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why."
— Hunter S. Thompson (The Curse of Lono)

"We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or where will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Irag, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for war seem to know who did it or where to look for them.

This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed--for anyone, and certainly not for a baffled little creep like George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it off."
— Hunter S. Thompson

"America…just a nation of two hundred million used-car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualm about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable."
— Hunter S. Thompson

"Every now and then you run up on one of those days when everythings in vain . . . . a stone bummer from start to finish; if you know what's good for you, on days like these you sortof hunker down in a safe corner and watch. Maybe think a bit."
— Hunter S. Thompson

"Buy the ticket, take the ride."
— Hunter S. Thompson

"There was an awful suspicion in my mind that I'd finally gone over the hump, and the worst thing about it was that I didn't feel tragic at all, but only weary, and sort of comfortably detached."
— Hunter S. Thompson (The Rum Diary: A Novel)