"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."

"A totally befuddled voter may look at a Vote for McGovern sign and do just that."

"Victory is a fleeting thing in the gambling business. Today's winners are tomorrow's blinking toads, dumb beasts with no hope."

"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."

"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."

"I have never believed much in luck, and my sense of humor has tended to walk on the dark side."

"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?"

"To crank up a noisy bad stance out in a place like San Francisco and start yelling about "getting things done in Washington is like sitting far back in the end zone seats at the Super Bowl and screaming at the Miami linebackers "Stop Duane Thomas!"

"This is the fast lane, folks...and some of us like it here."

"Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel. I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio."

"In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely."

"Hallucinations are bad enough. But after awhile 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. 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."

"The best thing about the Kentucky Derby is that it is only two minutes long. It is the quickest event in sports, except for Sumo-wrestling & Mike Tyson fights. Maybe Drag-racing is quicker, but I have never been attracted to it."

"Justice is not cheap in this country, and people who insist on it are usually either desperate or possessed by some private determination bordering on monomania."

"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."

"I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling."

"One of the most basic factors in sports is that winning becomes a habit, and losing is the same way. When failure starts to feel normal in your life or your work or even your darkest vices, you won't have to go looking for trouble, because trouble will find you. Count on it."

"In the terms of our Great Society the Hell's Angels and their ilk are losers -- dropouts, failures and malcontents. They are rejects looking for a way to get even with a world in which they are only a problem.The Hell's Angels are not visionaries, but diehards, and if they are the forerunners or the vanguard of anything it is not the "moral revolution" in vogue on college campuses, but a fast-growing legion of young unemployables whose untapped energy will inevitably find the same kind of destructive outlet that "outlaws" like the Hell's Angels have been finding for years."

"The mind of America is seized by a fatal dry rot - and it's only a question of time before all that the mind controls will run amuck in a frenzy of stupid, impotent fear."

"Maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish-a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live out where the real winds blow-to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested . . . Res ipsa loquitur. Let the good times roll."

"Of all the men that have run for president in the twentieth century, only George McGovern truly understood what a monument America could be to the human race."

"Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously."

"How many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote FOR something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?"

"As long as I'm learning something, I figure I'm OK - it's a decent day."

"Nixon was a bad loser. He hated losing worse than death, and that is why I enjoyed him. We were both football fans, both addicts; and on some days, nothing else mattered."

"If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism."

"This place is like the Army: the shark ethic prevails--eat the wounded. 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."

"A word to the wise is infuriating."

"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?"

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

"Yes sir, I am a tortured man for all seasons, as they say, and I have powerful friends in high places. Birds sing where I walk, and children smile when they see me coming."

"If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up."

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

"We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and-in spite of True Romance magazines-we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely-at least, not all the time-but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness."

"The trouble with Nixon is that he's a serious politics junkie. He's totally hooked and like any other junkie, he's a bummer to have around, especially as President."

"Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning."

"The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don't mind admitting it. They worship money and power and death. Their ideal solution to all the nation's problems would be another 100 Year War."

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

"All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their failure is ours, too. 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 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."

"The person who doesn't scatter the morning dew will not comb gray hairs."

"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 up to forced consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten."

"I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me."

"We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws."

"Morality is temporary, wisdom is permanent."

"Finally we came over a rise and I saw the Caribbean...My first feeling was a wild desire to drive a stake in the sand and claim the place for myself. The beach was white as salt, and cut off from the world by a ring of steep hills that faced the sea. We were on the edge of a large bay and the water was that clear, turquoise color that you get with a white sand bottom. I had never seen such a place. I wanted to take off all my clothes and never wear them again."

"I learned a long time ago that reality was much weirder than anyone's imagination."

"So much for Objective Journalism. Don't bother to look for it here--not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. 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."

"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."

"Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush?They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us -- they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis.And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them."

"Call on God, but row away from the rocks."