Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Quotes

“No!” I said. “We must get out of this place. I need air. Let’s drive up to Reno and get a big tuna fish salad … hell, it won’t take long. Only about four hundred miles; no traffic out there on the desert …”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“infirmities”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“simpatico”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“psychologically off-balance”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“What sells, today, is whatever Fucks You Up”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“What sell, today, is whatever Fucks You Up”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“the desperate assumption that somebody—or at least some force—is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“with a head full of acid, the sight of two fantastically obese human beings far gone in a public grope while a thousand cops all around them watched a movie about the "dangers of marijuana" would not be emotionally acceptable. The brain would reject it”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“The rear windows leaped up with a touch, like frogs in a dynamite pond.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“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: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“you can get a lot higher without drugs than with them”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“the fiendish cactus juice took over, plunging me into a sub-human funk”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“Once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride...”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“Your room's not ready yet," she said. "But there's somebody looking for you."
"No!" I shouted. "Why? We haven't done anything yet!”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create … a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody—or at least some force—is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel. This is the same cruel and paradoxically benevolent bullshit that has kept the Catholic Church going for so many centuries. It is also the military ethic … a blind faith in some higher and wiser “authority.” The Pope, The General, The Prime Minister … all the way up to “God.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“There he goes. One of God's own prototypes, a high powered mutant of some kind never considered for mass production. Too weird to live and too rare to die.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. 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. . . .

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. 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—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”
― Thompson Hunter S, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“Jesus, just one hour ago we were sitting over there in that stinking bagnio, stone broke and paralyzed for the weekend, when a call comes through from some total stranger in New York, telling me to go to Las Vegas and expenses be damned—and then he sends me over to some office in Beverly Hills where another total stranger gives me $300 raw cash for no reason at all … I tell you, my man, this is the American Dream in action! We’d be fools not to ride this strange torpedo all the way out to the end.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“I know,” I said. “I’m a Triple Scorpio.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“These were the people who made my attorney nervous. Like most Californians, he was shocked to actually see these people from The Outback. Here was the cop-cream from Middle America … and, Jesus, they looked and talked like a gang of drunken pig farmers!”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“I thought about this … but the only alternative was to take her out to the desert and feed her remains to the lizards.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride … and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well … maybe chalk it off to forced consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten. It’s all in Kesey’s Bible.… The Far Side of Reality.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“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.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“Right,” I said. “But first we need the car. And after that, the cocaine. And then the tape recorder, for special music, and some Acapulco”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: The captivating memoir of countercultural journalism and social commentary

“We were past the point of debating the wisdom of this move; it was already done, and our only hope was to get to the other side.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“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.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era- the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be apart of. 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: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers … and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas