“All energy flows according to the whims of the great magnet. What a fool I was to defy him.”

— Hunter Thompson (1971), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Ѻ)

“History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullsh*t, 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 . . . 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 Thompson (1971), 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 conscious expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten ... it’s all in Kesey’s Bible .… the far side of reality.”

“Man’s theories about himself will build up, like tartar on a tooth, until something breaks the shell or until he succumbs to the twilight security of an armored blind mind.”

— Ken Kesey (1971), “The Bible”, attributed to Jerry Garcia [2]

“This task of revolution turned to with conscious purpose ten years ago has demanded nothing less than full time effort of everyone aware of the job to be done. No one has f*cked off—laid back, maybe, or f*cked up, but not really f*cked off—because the person who can still take a vacation has never gone to work—and very few have defected back to their former jobs. Who wants to take a train back and forth every day from one schizophrenic life to the other?”

— Ken Kesey (1971), “The Bible” [2]

“This is the same cruel and paradoxically benevolent bullsh*t 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 Thompson (1971), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun – for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax – This won't hurt.”

— Hunter Thompson (2005), suicide note last words (Ѻ)