Tom Wolfe - The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)

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A glorious place, a glorious age, I tell you! A very Neon Renaissance—And the myths that actually touched you at that time —not Hercules, Orpheus, Ulysses and Aeneas—but Superman, Captain Marvel, Batman.

Tom Wolfe
They were...well, Beautiful People! - not 'students', 'clerks', 'salesgirls', 'executive trainees' - Christ, don't give me your occupation-game labels! We are Beautiful People, ascendant from your robot junkyard.

Tom Wolfe
What do you mean, blindly? That baby is a very sentient creature… That baby sees the world with a completeness that you and I will never know again. His doors of perception have not yet been closed. He still experiences the moment he lives in.

Tom Wolfe
I went to see the Beatles last month... And I heard 20,000 girls screaming together at the Beatles... and I couldn't hear what they were screaming, either... But you don't have to... They're screaming Me! Me! Me! Me!... I'm Me!... That's the cry of the ego, and that's the cry of this rally!... Me! Me! Me! Me!... And that's why wars get fought... ego... because enough people want to scream Pay attention to Me... Yep, you're playing their game...

Tom Wolfe
It is either make this thing permanent inside of you or forever just climb draggled up into the conning tower every time for one short glimpse of the horizon.

Tom Wolfe
Everybody, everybody everywhere, has his own movie going, his own scenario, and everybody is acting his movie out like mad, only most people don't know that is what they're trapped by, their little script.

Tom Wolfe
Sometimes we don't even realize what we really care about, because we get so distracted by the symbols.

Tom Wolfe
The world was simply and sheerly divided into 'the aware', those who had the experience of being vessels of the divine, and a great mass of 'the unaware', 'the unmusical', 'the unattuned.

Tom Wolfe
... like fishing for neon gumballs with a steam shovel in the Funtime arcade.

Tom Wolfe
Don't just describe an emotion, arouse it, make them experience it, by manipulating the symbol of the emotion, and sometimes we have to come into awareness through the back door.

Tom Wolfe
His hair has the long jesuschrist look. He is wearing the costume clothes. But most of all, he now has a very tolerant and therefore withering attitude toward all those who are still struggling in the old activist political ways...while he, with the help of psychedelic chemicals, is exploring the infinite regions of human consciousness.

Tom Wolfe