Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Quotes

“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: The captivating memoir of countercultural journalism and social commentary

“By the time I got to the terminal I was pouring sweat. But nothing abnormal. I tend to sweat heavily in warm climates. My clothes are soaking wet from dawn to dusk. This worried me at first, but when I went to a doctor and described my normal daily intake of booze, drugs and poison he told me to come back when the sweating stopped. That would be the danger point, he said—a sign that my body’s desperately overworked flushing mechanism had broken down completely. “I have great faith in the natural processes,” he said. “But in your case … well … I find no precedent. We’ll just have to wait and see, then work with what’s left.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“This is the main advantage of ether: it makes you behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel … total loss of all basic motor skills: blurred vision, no balance, numb tongue—severance of all connection between the body and the brain. Which is interesting, because the brain continues to function more or less normally … you can actually watch yourself behaving in this terrible way, but you can’t control it. You approach the turnstiles leading into the Circus-Circus and you know that when you get there, you have to give the man two dollars or he won’t let you inside … but when you get there, everything goes wrong: you misjudge the distance to the turnstile and slam against it, bounce off and grab hold of an old woman to keep from falling, some angry Rotarian shoves you and you think: What’s happening here? What’s going on? Then you hear yourself mumbling: “Dogs fucked the Pope, no fault of mine. Watch out! … Why money? My name is Brinks; I was born … born? Get sheep over side … women and children to armored car … orders from Captain Zeep.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“Dans une société bloquée où tout le monde est coupable, le seul crime est de se faire prendre. Dans un univers de voleurs, le seul péché défintif est la stupidité".”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“Many fine books have been written in prison.”
― 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

“In a town full of bedrock crazies, nobody even notices an acid freak.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

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

“Att’y: Are your eyes blue or green? Waitress: Pardon? Att’y: Blue or green? Waitress: They change. Att’y: Like a lizard? Waitress: Like a cat. Att’y: Oh, the lizard changes the color of his skin … Waitress: Want anything to drink? Att’y: Beer. And I have beer in the car. Tons of it. The whole back seat’s full of it. Duke: I don’t like mixing coconuts up with beer and hamburgers.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: The captivating memoir of countercultural journalism and social commentary

“Look over there,” I said. “Two women fucking a polar bear.” “Please,” he said. “Don’t tell me those things. Not now.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: The captivating memoir of countercultural journalism and social commentary

“Now off the escalator and into the casino, big crowds still tight around the crap tables. Who are these people? These faces! Where do they come from? They look like caricatures of used-car dealers from Dallas. But they’re real. And, sweet Jesus, there are a hell of a lot of them—still screaming around these desert-city crap tables at four-thirty on a Sunday morning. Still humping the American Dream, that vision of the Big Winner somehow emerging from the last-minute pre-dawn chaos of a stale Vegas casino.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

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

“من يجعل من نفسه وحشًا، يتخلص من ألم الإنسانية”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“I stared at him, keeping a firm grip on the radio. "Not me," I said finally. "I'd be happy to ram a goddamn 440-volt cattle prod into that tub with you right now, but not this radio. It would blast you right through the wall-stone-dead in ten seconds." I laughed. "Shit, they'd make me explain it-drag me down to some rotten coroner's inquest and grill me about...yes...the exact details. I don't need that."

Bullshit!" he screamed. "Just tell them I wanted to get HIGHER!”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

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

“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”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: The captivating memoir of countercultural journalism and social commentary

“leave the other stuff to Life”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: The captivating memoir of countercultural journalism and social commentary

“Thompson committed suicide at his home in Colorado in February 2005.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: The captivating memoir of countercultural journalism and social commentary

“(Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was written with the aid of recordings Thompson had made of Kesey’s circle.)”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: The captivating memoir of countercultural journalism and social commentary

“Uppers are going out of style. This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip. He crashed around America selling “consciousness 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.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: The captivating memoir of countercultural journalism and social commentary

“What would Dr. Darwin do under these circumstances? (Survival of the … fittest? Was that the proper word? Had Darwin ever considered the idea of temporary unfitness? Like “temporary insanity.” Could the Doctor have made room in his theory for a thing like LSD?)”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: The captivating memoir of countercultural journalism and social commentary

“Beyond that, I’d been out of my head for so long now, that a gig like this seemed perfectly logical. Considering the circumstances, I felt totally meshed with my karma.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: The captivating memoir of countercultural journalism and social commentary

“If the Pigs were gathering in Vegas for a top-level Drug Conference, we felt the drug culture should be represented.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: The captivating memoir of countercultural journalism and social commentary

“It is a weird feeling to sit in a Las Vegas hotel at four in the morning—hunkered down with a notebook and a tape recorder in a $75-a-day suite and a fantastic room service bill, run up in forty-eight hours of total madness—knowing that just as soon as dawn comes up you are going to flee without paying a fucking penny … go stomping out through the lobby and call your red convertible down from the garage and stand there waiting for it with a suitcase full of marijuana and illegal weapons … trying to look casual, scanning the first morning edition of the Las Vegas Sun.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: The captivating memoir of countercultural journalism and social commentary

“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. Reality itself is too twisted.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: The captivating memoir of countercultural journalism and social commentary

“A little bit of this town goes a very long way. After five days in Vegas you feel like you’ve been here for five years. Some people say they like it—but then some people like Nixon, too.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

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

“You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.…”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas