It is not necessary to accept the choices handed down to you by life as you know it. There is more to it than that — no one HAS to do something he do… - Hunter S. Thompson

It is from the bystanders (who are in the vast majority) that we receive the propaganda that life is not worth living, that life is drudgery, that the ambitions of youth must he laid aside for a life which is but a painful wait for death. These are the ones who squeeze what excitement they can from life out of the imaginations and experiences of others through books and movies. These are the insignificant and forgotten men who preach conformity because it is all they know. These are the men who dream at night of what could have been, but who wake at dawn to take their places at the now-familiar rut and to merely exist through another day. For them, the romance of life is long dead and they are forced to go through the years on a treadmill, cursing their existence, yet afraid to die because of the unknown which faces them after death. They lacked the only true courage: the kind which enables men to face the unknown regardless of the consequences.

The prevailing quality of life in America — by any accepted methods of measuring — was unarguably freer and more politically open under Nixon than it is today in this evil year of Our Lord 2002.

The trade is meaningless. It is like trading a used mattress for a $300 bill.