1
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.Hunter S. Thompson
2
It had been a bad trip. .. fast and wild in some moments, slow and dirty in others, but on balance it looked like a bummer. On my way back to San Francisco, I tried to compose a fitting epitaph. I wanted something original, but there was no escaping the echo of Mistah Kurtz' final words from the heart of darkness: "The horror! The horror!. .. Exterminate all the brutes!Hunter S. Thompson
3
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.Hunter S. Thompson
4
In the Carolinas they say "hill people" are different from "flatlands people, " and as a native Kentuckian with more mountain than flatlands blood, I'm inclined to agree. This was one of the theories I'd been nursing all the way from San Francisco. Unlike Porterville or Hollister, Bass Lake was a mountain community. . and if the old Appalachian pattern held, the people would be much slower to anger or panic, but absolutely without reason or mercy once the fat was in the fire. Like the Angels, they would tend to fall back in an emergency on their own native sense of justice -- which bears only a primitive resemblance to anything written in law books. I thought the mountain types would be far more tolerant of the Angels' noisy showboating, but -- compared to their flatlands cousins -- much quicker to retaliate in kind at the first evidence of physical insult or abuse.Hunter S. Thompson
5
The only problem with the Angels' new image was that the outlaws themselves didn't understand it. It puzzled them to be treated as symbolic heroes by people with whom they had almost nothing in common. Yet they were gaining access to a whole reservoir of women, booze, drugs and new action -- which they were eager to get their hands on, and symbolism be damned. But they could never get the hang of the role they were expected to play, and insisted on ad-libbing the lines. This fouled their channels of communication, which made them nervous. . and after a brief whirl on the hipster party circuit, all but a few decided it was both cheaper and easier, in the long run, to buy their own booze and hustle a less complicated breed of pussy.Hunter S. Thompson
6
The point is valid: the difference between survival and wipe-out in a physical crisis is nearly always a matter of conditioned reflexes.Hunter S. Thompson
7
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.Hunter S. Thompson
8
There is not much mental distance between a feeling of having been screwed and the ethic of total retaliation, or at least the kind of random revenge that comes with outraging the public decency.Hunter S. Thompson
9
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.Hunter S. Thompson