Fear And Loathing Quotes

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is perfect in the same way that The Great Gatsby is perfect. Take a pencil and read these books, looking for something that doesn't sound right, something you'd want to change. You'll leave the page untouched.

We are all wired into a survival trip, now.

You better take care of me Lord, if you don't you're gonna have me on your hands.

I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that my instincts were right.

In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone.

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

Who said anything about slicing you up? ... I just wanted to carve a little Z on your forehead-- nothing serious.

So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.

Just sick enough to be totally confident

Too weird to live, and too rare to die.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.

Never create anything, it will be misinterpreted, it will chain you and follow you for the rest of your life.

It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat sh** and die.

I'm a relatively respectable citizen. Multiple felon perhaps, but certainly not dangerous.

Jerry Falwell turned gay bashing into a very successful art form.... the first fundamentalist to exploit the fear and loathing of homosexuals to raise hundreds of millions of dollars and add millions of new donors to his mailing list.

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.

In some circles, the Mint 400 is a far, far better thing than the Superbowl, the Kentucky Derby, and the lower Oakland roller derby finals all rolled into one. This race attracts a very special breed.

I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger: A man on the move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.

No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.

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.

Institutionalized rejection of differences is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate.

With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.

How long can we maintain? I wonder. How long before one of us starts raving and jabbering at this boy? What will he think then? This same lonely desert was the last known home of the Manson family. Will he make that grim connection.

The possibility of physical and mental collapse is very real now... but collapse is out of the question; as a solution or even a cheap alternative, it is unacceptable. No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind.

Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of 'the rat race' is not yet final.

Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of 'the rat race' is not yet final.

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.

I see light at the end of the tunnel.

Creating fear and loathing of gay and lesbian Americans has proven, year after year, to be the most effective say for Dobson and the other fundamentalist Christian leaders to raise millions of dollars and recruit millions of volunteers to support their long-range campaign to take back America.

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 understands at the time--and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. 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 - the mind recoils in horror, unable to communicate with the spinal column. Which is interesting, because you can actually watch yourself behaving in this terrible way, but you can’t control it.

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 conscious expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten.

He who makes a beast out of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

People don't know where to place me. Terry Gilliam used me as a quirky cop in 'Twelve Monkeys', and then he hired me again to be an effeminate hotel clerk in 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'. Another time, I was shooting this indie film 'The Souler Opposite' and six days a week, I'm playing this big puppy dog, then I come to the 'NYPD Blue' set and become this scumbag.

The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.

Still humping the American Dream

Myths and legends die hard in America.

America... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

With a bit of luck, his life was ruined forever. Always thinking that just behind some narrow door in all of his favorite bars, men in red woolen shirts are getting incredible kicks from things he’ll never know.

A man who has blown all his options can't afford the luxury of changing his ways. He has to capitalize on whatever he has left, and he can't afford to admit - no matter how often he's reminded of it - that every day of his life takes him farther and farther down a blind alley.

Those of us that had been up all night were in no mood for coffee and donuts, we wanted strong drink. We were, after all, the cream of the national sporting press.

Good people drink good beer.

Do not look upon this world with fear and loathing. Bravely face whatever the gods offer.

Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body.

Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!

Not everybody is comfortable with the idea that politics is a guilty addiction. But it is.

But after a while 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.