Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas Quotes

Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas ... with the music at top volume and at least a pint of ether. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

I've seen Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Californication, and far as I can tell the coolest thing about writing is all the stuff you do when you're not writing. ~ The Gang

You people voted for Hubert Humphrey and killed Jesus! ~ Hunter S. Thompson

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. ~ Christopher Meloni

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. ~ William McKeen

A year or so earlier I had been to the Sky River Rock Festival in rural Washington, where a dosen stone-broke freaks from Seattle Liberation Front had assembled a sound system that carried every small note of an acoustic guitar - even a cough or the sound of a boot drooping on the stage - to half-deaf acid victims huddled under bushes a half mile away.
But the best technicians available to the National DAs' convention in Vegas apparently couldn't handle it. Their sound system looked like something Ulysses S. Grant might have triggered up to addres his troops during the Siege of Vicksburg. The voices from up front crackled with a fuzzy, high-pitched urgency, and the delay was just enough to keep the words disconcertingly out of phaze with the speaker's gestures. (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, p. 73) ~ Hunter S. Thompson

Finish-the-fucking-story".
"Music! ~ Johnny Depp

So here, then, is the last fifty years of American politics summarized: we became more consistent in the party we vote for not because we came to like our party more - indeed, we've come to like the parties we vote for less - but because we came to dislike the opposing party more. Even as hope and change sputter, fear and loathing proceed. ~ Ezra Klein

Nick,' he corrected quietly. 'As to your emotions, they show in your face, in
those amazing eyes. One day soon those eyes will change colour and glow
for me.'
'They already have done,' Joanna snapped, rage surfacing. 'I never liked you,
Mr Martella, and now I can only think I hate you. If I should ever know that
you're coming here again I'll make quite sure I'm a long way off!'
He took one menacing step towards her and Joanna backed away, her
expression of loathing making his face harden frighteningly.
'I will not touch you,' he grated angrily. 'I will merely tell you this: J leave
for America tomorrow. I shall be there for two months. When I return I
intend to come for you.'
The thought of people in the house left Joanna's head entirely. Her hands
clenched at her sides and her considerable temper surfaced over grief, fear
and utter bewilderment.
'If you were the last man in the universe I wouldn't consent to be near you!'
she shouted. 'You've taken away everything I've ever wanted. You've even
sneaked up and taken my father. Now I can never go to Santa Marta again!'
'I know you love the island,' he said with surprising quiet. 'Your father told
me. We will live there and you will see your father whenever you care to
walk down the beach to his house.'
'I'll see him when he comes over to England,' Joanna corrected bitterly. 'One
thing is for sure, though ~ Patricia Wilson

He was praying the Psalms, as he'd done in times past, with the enemies of King David translated into his own enemies of fear and remorse and self-loathing, which, in their legions, had become as armies of darkness. ~ Jan Karon

We, the black people, the most displaced, the poorest, the most maligned and scourged, we had the glorious task of reclaiming the soul and saving the honor of the country. We, the most hated, must take hate into our hands and by the miracle of love, turn loathing into love. We, the most feared and apprehensive must take fear and by love, change it into hope. We, who die daily in large and small ways, must take the demon death and turn it into life.-Martin Luther King Jr. ~ Maya Angelou

Sit down and have a cup of coffee
With your firm conviction that they're out to get you
Sit down and have a cigarette with your awful fear of death
I saw Milarepa at the all-night diner sharing a table with his personal demons
He said You've got to invite them in with compassion on your breath

Stop running away, 'cause nobody runs as fast as pain and sorrow
Stop pushing away, you're just making it hard
Stop putting it off, 'cause it'll be back to kick your ass tomorrow
Breathe in, breathe out, let down your guard

Sit down and start shooting the shit
With the fear that you'll never measure up to your ideals
Sit down and have a bottle of beer with the ache of all you've lost
I saw Milarepa at the coffee house having a Danish with his hurts and hatreds
He said You've got to invite them in, or you pay ten times the cost.

Stop running away, 'cause nobody runs as fast as fear and loathing
Stop pushing away, you're just making it worse
Stop putting it off, cause it'll be back again in different clothing
Just pop the clutch and go into reverse

Invite them in and let them be there while you learn to stand it
Invite them in and give them room to stomp and shout
When they can come and go
They won't be always pounding on your door
If you let them in you can let them out.

Sit down and have a conversation
With the loneliness that's eating yo ~ Allison Lonsdale

Bill Clinton was friendly and charming with just about everyone besides Hillary. He always seemed to want to give his company extra time. He was very generous that way. Like him or not, share his political ideas or not, find yourself in the same room with him, and you are hooked. You can't help but like him. But that was not Hillary. She was clearly all business, 24/7. Her private leadership style was based on pure fear and loathing - and I never saw her that turn off. Even in the president's presence, Mrs. Clinton operated at far greater than arm's length - a cheerless grifter always on her scheming way to someone or something else more important than the person directly in front of her. ~ Gary J. Byrne

If God made all our faces, did he laugh when he made me?
Does he make the legs that cannot walk and eyes that cannot see?
Does he curl the hair upon my head 'til it rebels in wild defiance?
Does he close the ears of a deaf man to make him more reliant?
Is the way I look a coincidence or just a twist of fate?
If he made me this way, is it okay, to blame him for the things I hate?
For the flaws that seem to worsen every time I see a mirror,For the ugliness I see in me, for the loathing and the fear.
Does he sculpt us for his pleasure, for a reason I can't see?
If God makes all our faces, did he laugh when he made me? ~ Amy Harmon

The insidious reasons for a brown girl's self-loathing won't be surprising to any woman of color. I cannot rightly compare my own struggles to those of another minority, as each ethnicity comes with its own baggage and the South Asian experience is just one variation on the experience of dark-skinned people everywhere. As parents and grandparents often do in Asian countries, my extended family urged me to avoid the sun, not out of fear that heatstroke would sicken me or that UV rays would lead to cancer, but more, I think, out of fear that my skin would darken to the shade of an Untouchable, a person from the lowest caste in Indian society, someone who toils in the fields. The judgments implicit in these exhortations - and what they mean about your worth - might not dawn on you while you're playing cricket in the sand. What's at stake might not dawn on you while, as a girl, you clutch fast to yourself your blonde-haired, blue-eyed doll named Helen. But all along, the message that lighter skin is equivalent to a more attractive, worthier self is getting beamed deep into your subconscious. Western ideals of beauty do not stop at ocean shores. They pervade the world and mingle with those of your own country to create mutant, unachievable standards. ~ Padma Lakshmi

Sometime the witch hunting takes on atrocious dimensions - the Nazi persecution of Jews, the Salem witch trials, the Ku Klux Klan scapegoating of blacks. Notice, however, that in all such cases the persecutor hates the persecuted for precisely those traits that the persecutor displays with a glaringly uncivilized fury. At other times, the witch hunt appears in less terrifying proportions - the cold war fear of a "Commie under every bed," for instance. And often, it appears in comic form - the interminable gossip about everybody else that tells you much more about the gossiper than about the object of gossip. But all of these are instances of individuals desperate to prove that their own shadows belong to other people.

Many men and women will launch into tirades about how disgusting homosexuals are. Despite how decent and rational they otherwise try to behave, they find themselves seized with a loathing of any homosexual, and in an emotional outrage will advocate such things as suspending gay civil rights (or worse). But why does such an individual hate homosexuals so passionately? Oddly, he doesn't hate the homosexual because he is homosexual; he hates him because he sees in the homosexual what he secretly fears he himself might become. He is most uncomfortable with his own natural, unavoidable, but minor homosexual tendencies, and so projects them. He thus comes to hate the homosexual inclinations in other people - but only because he first hates them in himself ~ Ken Wilber

Transference of fear and self-loathing to an authoritarian vessel. It's catharsis. He absorbs their dread with his narrative. Because of this, he's effective in proportion to the amount of certainty he can project.
Certain linguistic anthropologists think that religion is a language virus that rewrites pathways in the brain. Dulls critical thinking. ~ Rust Cohle, True Detective

But our trip was different. It was a classic affirmation of everything right and true and decent in the national character. It was a gross, physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country-but only for those with true grit. And we were chock full of that. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

And what about ageing? Do men force the fear of ageing upon us
or are we ourselves terrified because we only know one kind of power
the power of youthful beauty?
Isn't it possible that if we became comfortable with other forms of female power, men might too? In her wonderful futurist novel, He, She, and It, Marge Piercy imagines a cyborg who is taught to love the bodies of older women. A delicious proposal
because it tells that whatever we may imagine can come true. Women often hate their own bodies. Sometimes I think that the most important things about having at least one relationship with someone of your own gender
especially if you are a woman
is to confront the female self-hatred and turn it into self-love. ~ Erica Jong

For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices. ~ Audre Lorde

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. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

On this side of the Atlantic, the arrival of a new Woody Allen movie is always greeted with tremors of bliss by filmgoers past the age of 60, with mild curiosity by those in their 50s, with trepidation by those in their 40s, with fear and loathing by those in their 30s, and with complete indifference by anyone younger. An icon to baby boomers, who will never concede that when something is over, it is really over (Clapton, McCartney, Santana, the 1960s), Allen has not made a truly memorable film since Bullets On Broadway back in 1994 ~ Joe Queenan

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. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

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. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

That's the myth of it, the required lie that allows us to render our judgments. Parasites, criminals, dope fiends, dope peddlers, whores--when we can ride past them at Fayette and Monroe, car doors locked, our field of vision cautiously restricted to the road ahead, then the long journey into darkness is underway. Pale-skinned hillbillies and hard-faced yos, toothless white trash and gold-front gangsters--when we can glide on and feel only fear, we're well on the way. And if, after a time, we can glimpse the spectacle of the corner and manage nothing beyond loathing and contempt, then we've arrived at last at that naked place where a man finally sees the sense in stretching razor wire and building barracks and directing cattle cars into the compound.

It's a reckoning of another kind, perhaps, and one that becomes a possibility only through the arrogance and certainty that so easily accompanies a well-planned and well-tended life. We know ourselves, we believe in ourselves; from what we value most, we grant ourselves the illusion that it's not chance in circumstance, that opportunity itself isn't the defining issue. We want the high ground; we want our own worth to be acknowledged. Morality, intelligence, values--we want those things measured and counted. We want it to be about Us.

Yes, if we were down there, if we were the damned of the American cities, we would not fail. We would rise above the corner. And when we tell ourselves such things, we unthinka ~ David Simon

The beauty of compassion and acceptance is this: it neutralizes the attachment you feel to the n, to the pain and the hurt of the relationship. If we stop throwing energy at the hurt and pain (and narcissist, even simply by continuing to fume about what happened), the power of the pain slowly fades. As we said earlier, many believe an n is "in love" with the self, but it is really a fleeting and desperate attachment to an illusion of self that they have. Beneath this facade is a deep self-loathing and fear that fills the n. ~ Meredith Resnick

i was once swallowed in a dark shroud
of fear, pain, and self-loathing
which i believed i couldn't voice
because if i spoke of my loneliness
would it not prove my uselessness?
light could not break the shadows
unless i asked for help
and when i finally became so lost
i reached out in desperation
for even the smallest guidance
every tearful thought i had hidden
was exposed in all of its falsehood
depression is not the problem
it's when we choose to conceal it



-My Relationship with Depression ~ Michelle S. Smith

Terror - what Hunter Thompson calls "fear and loathing" - often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking. If that sense of unmaking is sudden and seems personal - if it hits you around the heart - then it lodges in the memory as a complete set. ~ Stephen King

My blood is too thick for California: I have never been able to properly explain myself in this climate. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

Shame and discipline won't cut it First, shame is not an agent of change. Like a shot of caffeine in the morning, self-loathing may propel us onto the road of change, but we will find that hatred of self only leads us onto a never-ending roundabout. Like being terrified by a number on the scale in the morning and vowing never to overeat again, a shot of shame may get us through to lunch but never through to our freedom. Self-hatred, shame, and fear - though rampant in so many of our hidden worlds - are simply never going to be capable of creating or sustaining the growth we long for. Yet most women try to use shame as their inner motivator. I know I have. ~ Stasi Eldredge

I am the One, and I see all.
But the blind man in Apartment 1-A is blind in many ways, as are all human beings, even those with functioning eyes. They are blind to their folly, to their ignorance, to their history, to the future that they will make for themselves. A future born of self-loathing. ~ Dean Koontz

Yet if the Howard years changed little in the law, they had a huge effect on the culture. Most Australians certainly became wealthier, but in the process they became more materialistic and self-centred. Howard constantly held up the ideal of mateship, but in practice he was much more concerned with individuals taking responsibility for themselves than in fostering genuine co-operation within communities, let alone in a wider international context. Indeed, much of his political success derived from setting groups against each other, from bolstering fear and loathing. ~ Mungo MacCallum

Make no mistake, hiding one's true self away in a closet and creating a facade of heterosexuality is not without its consequences. It may appear to have a degree of safety but from my experience they are very unhealthy places and do all kinds of terrible things to individuals psychologically, emotionally and behaviourally ... to say nothing of projection. The damage of the fear, shame, guilt and self-loathing that exist inside a closet are often reflected unknowingly in the external life of the individual. In or out of the closet; there is a price to pay. Each individual must weigh up the consequences of honesty, openness, secrecy and deception for themselves. Coming out, for most of us, is like an exorcism that releases us of the darkness we have lived in for years and caused us to believe awful things about ourselves. On the other side of the looking glass are freedom, light and life. ~ Anthony Venn-Brown

A fight like this was stunning, revealing not just how much he was on the lookout for enemies, but how she too was unable to abandon argument which escalated into rage. Neither of them would back off, they held bitterly to principles.
Can't you tolerate people being different, why is this so important?
If this isn't important, nothing is.
The air seemed to grow thick with loathing. All over a matter that could never be resolved. They went to bed speechless, parted speechless the next morning, and during the day were overtaken by fear - hers that he would never come home, his that when he did she would not be there. Their luck held, however. They came together in the late afternoon pale with contrition, shaking with love, like people who had narrowly escaped an earthquake and had been walking around in naked desolation. ~ Alice Munro

Peele has found a concrete metaphor for the ultimate unspoken fear: that to be oppressed is not so much to be hated as obscenely loved. Disgust and passion are intertwined. Our antipathies are simultaneously a record of our desires, our sublimated wishes, our deepest envies. The capacity to give birth; the capacity to make food from one's body; perceived intellectual, physical or sexual superiority; perceived intimacy with the natural world, animals and plants; perceived self-sufficiency in a faith, or in a community. There are few qualities in others we cannot transform into a form of fear and loathing in ourselves. ~ Zadie Smith

Institutionalized rejection of difference 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 difference 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. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals. As a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the service of separation and confusion. ~ Audre Lorde

I'm a Sagittarian, see, I can't be fenced in. I been living in Las Vegas, greatest city in the world. I look out my window for 100 miles. In Vegas, there's nothing to do but gamble, drink or have sex. I have two of 'em. ~ Redd Foxx

They look outside the windows of their apartment in town and realize they're not living in a terrace anymore. This is a room full of dreamers who like to go to London for a day. ~ Johnny Vegas

Monogamy doesn't work unless it rises up from the bones. Because it promises nothing but fear and tension when forced on you. It fills you up with despair where there might be joy. It shoves guilt and paranoia and self-loathing down your throat, if you don't truly want it. ~ Will Christopher Baer

The night before I left Las Vegas I walked out in the desert to look at the moon. There was a jeweled city on the horizon, spires rising in the night, but the jewels were diadems of electric and the spires were the neon of signs ten stories high. ~ Norman Mailer

The reinvention of American culture as purely the self catapulted Las Vegas to prominence. The city took sin and made it choice
a sometimes ambiguous choice, but choice nonetheless. Combined with a visionary approach to experience that melded Hollywood and Americans' taste for comfort and self-deception, Las Vegas grew into the last American frontier city, as foreign at times as Prague but as quintessential as Peoria. In Las Vegas, you can choose your fantasy; in the rest of America, you don't always get to pick. ~ Hal Rothman

And I saw my reflection in a lake and I waited for it to freeze a little bit so I could break it with my boot. ~ Sam Pink

Wrote my book in many places - houses in Florida, and in a cabin on a Wisconsin lake, and in a hotel room in Las Vegas. I ~ Neil Gaiman

You will say that it is vulgar and contemptible to drag all this into public after all the tears and transports which I have myself confessed. But why is it contemptible? Can you imagine that I am ashamed of it all, and that it was stupider than anything in your life, gentlemen? And I can assure you that some of these fancies were by no means badly composed . . . . It did not all happen on the shores of Lake Como. And yet you are right - it really is vulgar and contemptible. And most contemptible of all it is that now I am attempting to justify myself to you. And even more contemptible than that is my making this remark now. But that's enough, or there will be no end to it; each step will be more contemptible than the last . . . ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Too young to party, just odd enough to participate in federal investigations of serial murder. Story of my life. ~ Jennifer Lynn Barnes

What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. Except for tattoos and STDs. ~ D.D. Barant

Actually, I was born in Las Vegas. My parents moved to Utah when I was eight because, after 40 years in Vegas, they were tired of it. We ended up in Nephi, a really small town in Utah. ~ Brandon Flowers

When I was in my early forties, I slept with a loaded gun under my bed. I'd become severely depressed in my thirties, and for almost a decade I spiraled down into paranoia, rage, self-loathing, and thoughts of suicide. ~ Byron Katie

If what happens in Las Vegas is supposed to stay in Las Vegas, how did Harry Reid get out? ~ Wesley Pruden