"That by 1774 the final crisis of the constitution, brought on by political and social corruption, had been reached was, to most informed colonists, evident; ..."

"The turning point was the Tea Act and the resulting Tea Party in Boston in December 1773."

"Everyone knew that democracy-direct rule by all the people-required such spartan, self-denying virtue on the part of all the people that it was likely to survive only where poverty made upright behavior necessary for the perpetuation of the race."

"The wielders of power did not speak for it, nor did they naturally serve it. Their interest was to use and develop power, no less natural and necessary than liberty but more dangerous."

"But he discovered his success later, when he began to write just like he talked."

"Now the ashes drifted, as Hunter must have known they would, back toward the guests standing in front of the viewing pavilion. As the guests stood holding their glasses, the ash floated and settled into their drinks."

"Putting Hunter in context was tough."

"He kept growing. He thought it was very important to keep growing all your life."

"Nothing infuriates an academic more than a talented and successful colleague."

"His legions of stoned admirers probably really thought he took a hundred hits of acid before sitting down to write. But the craftsmanship those close to him saw as he agonized over his words spoke to how much went into making it look like a breeze."

"Hunter couldn't stop working. McCumber remembered Hunter working nine days without sleep."

"Some of the locals began to think that maybe Hunter was getting out of control."

"The lifestyle of the character he had created had consumed him."

"To the generation of young political reporters, Hunter was Mount Rushmore, a living god on earth."

"For a man complaining about the agony of celebrity, he wasn't doing anything to stop perpetuating his image as America's premier outlaw journalist."

"And whether he wanted to be or not, he was famous."

"Perhaps the heart of the American Dream was found in the search."

"This writing wasn't painful. It was like being high."

"He wrote his mother that he had begun to hate the sight of his typewriter."

"The Dream obsessed him ... but what was it? Was it Horatio Alger, rags to riches, the idea that you could start with nothing and end up rolling naked in stacks of hundreds? Or was it a dream of freedom? Personal freedom...or the concept of freedom that the founders brought into the whole world?"

"One of Hunter's first acts upon moving to Colorado was serving as best man at Billy's wedding to Anne Willis. Aside from Hunters putting out his cigarette in the holy water, the wedding transpired without major incident."

"Barger thought Hunter provoked Junkie George so that the beating could be used as a gimmick to promote the book."

"Hunter Thompson wrote suicide notes all his life."

"To create a balance of power and pedigree in the house, Hunter sent five bucks off to an ad he'd seen in the back pages of a magazine and received his mail-order doctor-of-divinity degree. He began referring to himself as Dr. Thompson and punctuated remarks with his afterword: "I am, after all, a doctor." Friends picked up on the joke, and he was "the Good Doctor" for the rest of his life."

"In these letters to Ridley, Hunters Gonzo style began to rear its head. One of the characteristics of the style Hunter developed was his preoccupation of getting the story. In fact, getting the story became the story. His writing could be classified as metajournalism, journalism about the process of journalism."

"The latest firing had put him at a crossroads: he could continue with the fantasy of being a writer, or he could actually make the commitment."

"Hunter was picked as a promising electronics technician because he aced the Air Force radio-tech exam. Hunter shrugged off the the triumph. Tests were easy. You didn't have to know about radio and electronics; you just needed to be savvy in answering multiple-choice questions. He scored so high, the military thought he was the second coming of Marconi."

"Life as Hunter Thompson's mother was no weenie roast."

"His journalism was usually about journalism: no matter what he started out off writing about, he ended up writing about Hunter Thompson trying to cover a story."

"He taught himself to write, retyping books by writers he admired: Steinbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner... the usual heavyweights. He said he wanted to get inside the rhythm of their language and find his own stlye."

"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."

"A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students."

"For only the good doubt their own goodness, which is what makes them good in the first place. The bad know they are good, but the good know nothing. They spend their lives forgiving others, but they can't forgive themselves."

"[G]overnments always need enemies, even when they're not at war. If you don't have a real enemy, you make one up and spread the word. It scares the population, and when the people are scared, they tend not to step out of line."

"April 1945. My unit was in Germany, and we were the ones who liberated Dachau. Thirty thousands breathing skeletons. You've seen the pictures, but the pictures don't tell you what it was like. You have to go there and smell it for yourself; you have to be there and touch it with your own hands. Human beings did it to human beings, and they did it with a clear conscience. That was the end of mankind [...] I'm sure you've read the stories about how some of them couldn't stop eating. The starved ones. They'd thought about food for so long, they couldn't help it. They ate until their stomachs burst, and they died. Hundreds of them."

"Every time my nose gushed blood, I felt like a little boy who'd wet his pants. I jumped out of the chair, pressed a handkerchief against my face, and hustled toward the nearest bathroom [...] How red the blood looked against the whiteness of the porcelain sink, I thought. How vividly imagined that color was, how aesthetically shocking. The other fluids that came out of us were dull in comparison, the palest of squirts. Whitish spittle, milky semen, yellow pee, green-brown mucus. We excreted autumn and winter colors, but running invisibly through our veins, the very stuff that kept us alive, was the crimson of a mad artist—a red as brilliant as fresh paint."

"I didn't say I was afraid of dying, I answered, I said that I was afraid to get on a plane. There is a difference. (David to Dr. Singh)"

"If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it fall, does it make a sound or not? Hector had read alot of books by then, he knew all the tricks and arguments of the philosophers. If someone makes a movie and no one sees it, does the movie exist or not?"

"That's what makes his story so impossible, David. Because he's told me the truth. (Alma to David on Hector)"

"Men don't begin to live fully until their backs are against the wall."

"The story is not in the words; it's in the struggle."

"Final-offer arbitration should have great appeal for the daring (the risk seekers) who play against the timid (the risk avoiders)."

"It's easy, of course, for two teams to collude, but somewhat more difficult for twenty-eight-"

"It is always amazing to see how wide a spectrum of results can be obtained from replicating an identical negotiation with different principal actors; it makes no difference whether there subjects are inexperienced or whether they are senior executives and young presidents of business firms. That is an important lesson to be learned here."

"After a little reflection, the best strategy becomes clear: bid aggressively up to a maximum cutoff value and then quit."

"Each party tended to view its own chances in court as better than the other side viewed them."

"Advice: don't embarrass your bargaining partner by forcing him or her to make all the concessions."

"The best practical advice then is: try to maximize your expected payoff, which is the sum of all payoffs multiplied by probabilities."

"A mediator is an impartial outsider who tries to aid the negotiators in their quest to find a compromise agreement."