A persistent case of the bingos was enough to wash a man out of night carrier landings. That did not mean you were finished as a Navy pilot. It merely meant that you were finished so far as carrier ops were concerned, which meant that you were finished so far as combat was concerned, which meant you were no longer in the competition, no longer ascending the pyramid, no longer qualified for the company of those with the right stuff.

— Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe Quotes

They presumed a knowledge and an intimacy they did not have and had no right to. Some.

— Tom Wolfe

It is the responsibility of intellectuals,” he said, “to speak the truth and to expose lies. This, at least, may seem enough of a truism to pass over without comment. Not so, however. For the modern intellectual, it is not at all obvious.

— Tom Wolfe

Half a century ago, only Teilhard foresaw what is now known as the Internet. What Teilhard’s superiors in the Society of Jesus and the Church hierarchy thought about it all in the 1920s, however, was not much. The plain fact was that Teilhard accepted the Darwinian theory of evolution. He argued that biological evolution had been nothing more than God’s first step in an infinitely grander design. Nevertheless, he accepted it.

— Tom Wolfe

What have the breathtaking advances in communications technology done for the human mind? Beats me. SAT scores among the top tenth of high-school students in the United States, that fraction who are prime candidates for higher education in any period, are lower today than they were in the early 1960s. Believe, if you wish, that computers and the Internet in the classroom will change all that, but I assure you, it is sheer Digibabble.

— Tom Wolfe

Wilson compressed his theory into one sentence during an interview. Every human brain, he said, is born not as a blank slate waiting to be filled in by experience but as “an exposed negative waiting to be slipped into developer fluid.” The negative might be developed well or it might be developed poorly, but all you were going to get was what was already on the negative at birth.

— Tom Wolfe

The Avalon even had it down to details like the strobes and sections of the floor where you could play with Day-Glo paint under black light.

— Tom Wolfe

Lances and plumes! I’m a knight! Come up and fight! Why hold back! Knights of the Right Stuff!

— Tom Wolfe

They were alone in the elevator. Hoyt didn’t even wait for the doors to close before he started kissing Charlotte, pushing her up against the back wall, caressing her breasts, pressing his body against hers from chest to groin. She kissed him back in a spirited fashion and felt cool doing it, let her body go limp against the wall, wrapped her arms around his neck, allowed him to do whatever he wanted to her.

— Tom Wolfe

Some of them had terrible bummers – bummer was the Angels’ term for a bad trip on a motorcycle and very quickly it became the hip world’s term for a bad trip on LSD.

— Tom Wolfe

Oh Mario, and Dylan, and Joan Baez, oh Free Speech and Anti-Vietnam – who in his right mind would have ever dreamed it could come to this in twelve months – abandoned to the supermarket and the breezeway scions – a bunch of fraternity men in Mustangs – and it is, unbelievably, all as the provocateur Kesey has prophesied it, droning.

— Tom Wolfe

Royal! What a mockery it was of himself, a throbbing lump of flesh and fear cowering in bed in the dead of the night!

— Tom Wolfe

The pterodactyl and the brontosaurus were locked in mortal combat on the cliff over the Lost Continent.

— Tom Wolfe

After he came out of it, he could see that a lot of it was junk.

— Tom Wolfe

Kesey was referred to as a kind of “hipster Christ,” “a modern mystic,” after the model of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. As.

— Tom Wolfe

Later Kesey comes in and happens to say in the course of something – “Cassady doesn’t have to think any more” – then he walks away. It is as if for some reason he is furnishing Norman with part of the puzzle.

— Tom Wolfe

Intellectuals around San Francisco, particularly at Berkeley, at the University of California, were beginning to romanticize about the Angels in terms of “alienation” and “a generation in revolt,” that kind of thing.

— Tom Wolfe

Five years ago was before Walkman earphones. They can’t imagine that.

— Tom Wolfe

Martha nodded to indicate she was not dying. She tried to shrink. If her rectangle had had a drain in it, she would have gladly swirled down it and disappeared.

— Tom Wolfe

Every real leader knew that the occasional outburst of unexplained anger was good...

— Tom Wolfe

You do what you have to do, and I will do what I have to do, which is live and die like a man.

— Tom Wolfe
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