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"All around us were people I had spent ten years avoiding--shapeless women in wool bathing suits, dull-eyed men with hairless legs and self-conscious laughs, all Americans, all fearsomely alike. These people should be kept at home, I thought; lock them in the basement of some goddamn Elks Club and keep them pacified with erotic movies; if they want a vacation, show them a foreign art film; and if they still aren't satisfied, send them into the wilderness and run them with vicious dogs."
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"The literature hardly helps. You remember it only when you are well, healthy, and in a positive state of mind. And you tend to blame your circumstances and people around you for the outcome of the follies you commit."

"Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it."

"Miracles focused gospel teaches us to be selfish and egocentric."

"Oh, mankind, race of crocodiles! How well I recognize you down there, and how worthy you are of yourselves!"

"If [literature] should turn into pure propaganda or pure entertainment, society will slip back into the sty of the immediate -- which is to say, the memoryless existence of hymenoptera and gastropods. None of this is so important, to be sure. The world can get by nicely without literature. But without human beings it can get by better yet."

"You know what I think? I think you've picked up the Nazi idea that Jews can't create. That they can only imitate and sell. Middlemen.' He fixed his merciless scrutiny on Frink.'Maybe so,' Frink said."

"Don't criticize what you can't understand."

"Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history."
Explore more quotes by Hunter S. Thompson

"McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for.Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?"

"I hate pain, despite my ability to tolerate it beyond all known parameters, which is not necessarily a good thing."

"No man is so foolish but he may sometimes give another good counsel, and no man so wise that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than his own. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master."

"The point is valid: the difference between survival and wipe-out in a physical crisis is nearly always a matter of conditioned reflexes."

"The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage & whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy-then go back to the office & sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece."

"When you're asked to stay out of a bar you don't just punch the owner--you come back with your army and tear the place down, destroy the whole edifice and everything it stands for. No compromise. If a man gets wise, mash his face. If a woman snubs you, rape her. This is the thinking, if not the reality, behind the whole Hell's Angels act."

"What sells, today, is whatever Fucks You Up - whatever short-circuits your brain and grounds it out for the longest possible time."

"That was always the difference between Muhammad Ali and the rest of us. He came, he saw, and if he didn't entirely conquer - he came as close as anybody we are likely to see in the lifetime of this doomed generation."
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