Hunter S. Thompson Quote of the Day

A memo from the Rolling Stone magazine National Affairs Desk, August 1972, as published in Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist, 1968-1976. Here Thompson uses great imagery to describe the motivation of presidential candidates:

The dumb bastards [wild elk] lose all control of themselves when the rut comes on. Their eyes glaze over, their ears pack up with hot wax, and their loins get heavy with blood. Anything that sounds like a cow elk in heat will fuse the central nervous systems of every bull on the mountain. They will race through the timber like huge cannonballs, trampling small trees and scraping off bloody chunks of their own hair on the unyielding bark of the big ones. They behave like sharks in a feeding frenzy, attacking each other with all the demented violence of human drug dealers gone mad on their own wares. A career politician finally smelling the White House is not much different from a bull elk in the rut. He will stop at nothing, trashing everything that gets in his way; and anything he can't handle personally he will hire out -- or, failing that, make a deal. It is a difficult syndrome for most people to understand, because few of us ever come close to the kind of Ultimate Power and Achievement that the White House represents to a career politician.