Hell's Angels Quotes
"We’re the one percenters, man—the one percent that don’t fit and don’t care."
"Hell, most people you meet won’t tell you the truth about anything."
"In between drug-induced stupors, the Angels go on motorcycle-stealing forays."
"Only a few cultivate a noticeable body odor."
"Every Angel recruit comes to his initiation wearing a new pair of Levis and a matching jacket with the sleeves cut off and a spotless emblem on the back."
"The emblem of the Hell’s Angels, termed 'colors,' consists of an embroidered patch of a winged skull wearing a motorcycle helmet."
"Their world is so rife with hostility that they don’t even recognize it."
"They menaced her day and night—whining and booming below her window."
"They are deliberately hard on most strangers, but they get bad reactions even when they try to be friendly."
"The powerful stench they are said to exude is not so much body odor as the smell of old grease in their crusty uniforms."
"The very suggestion of a psychic compatibility will be denounced—by both groups—as a form of Communist slander."
"They’re the Wild Bill Hickoks, the Billy the Kids—they’re the last American heroes we have, man." — Ed "Big Daddy" Roth
"Motorcycle outlaws are not much in demand on the labor market."
"Their real motivation is an instinctive certainty as to what the score really is."
"In a world increasingly geared to specialists, technicians and fantastically complicated machinery, the Hell’s Angels are obvious losers and it bugs them."
"If one drawback to being a public figure was the inability to get a job, another was the disappointment in discovering that fame can come without money."
"Would ye deny the public prints?" — Anglo-Saxon motto
"The Angels were extremely proud of their Post exposure."
"We began to see that the Hell’s Angels were assuming a mythical character."
"People are already down on us because we’re Hell’s Angels. That’s why we like to blow their minds."
"Despite everything psychiatrists and Freudian castrators have to say about the Angels, they are tough, mean and potentially dangerous as packs of wild boar."
"There is nothing romantic about a bad crash, and the only solace is the deadening shock that comes with most injuries."
"A bartender with scar tissue all over his knuckles will hit faster and harder than a karate-trained novice who has never been bloodied."
"The difference between survival and wipe-out in a physical crisis is nearly always a matter of conditioned reflexes."
"Justice is not cheap in this country, and people who insist on it are usually either desperate or possessed by some private determination bordering on monomania."
"The Hell’s Angels are not of this persuasion—not even when it means giving up the pleasures of Reno."
"They measure a cop’s authority by his power to enforce it."
"American law enforcement procedures have never been designed to control large groups of citizens in rebellion, but to protect the social structure against specifically criminal acts, or persons."
"If you want the cops to leave you alone you have to shake em up."
"There’s not much good you can write about us, but I don’t see where that gives people the right to just make up stuff."
"The Hell’s Angels as a group are often willfully stupid, but they are not without savoir-faire."
"As weird and unreal as the Bass Lake confrontation might have sounded to radio listeners in New York or Chicago, nobody on the scene had any doubt about what they were seeing."
"John Foster Dulles might have called it a 'balance of terror,' a volatile stand-off which neither side wanted to upset."
"The real shocker, however, was the beer situation."
"This was evident to everyone concerned—even the beer-sellers."
"The psychopath, like the child, cannot delay the pleasures of gratification; and this trait is one of his underlying, universal characteristics."
"Hell, I don't know. Sometimes I like this scene, and sometimes I don't."
"All it takes is gall, a threatening appearance and a surly disregard for whatever the neighbors might think."
"Their world was a violent, boozing limbo between the pits of despair and the Big Rock Candy Mountain."
"They take pride in a certain uniqueness, a distinctive sort of life orientation that sets them apart."
"He made the usual disclaimers regarding the swastikas and Iron Crosses ('That don't mean nothin, we buy that stuff in dime stores')."
"Nobody is objective about rape. It is a horror and a titillation and a mystery all at once."
"Women are terrified of being raped, but somewhere in the back of every womb there is one rebellious nerve end that tingles with curiosity."
"Men speak of rapists with loathing, and talk about their victims as if they carried some tragic brand."
"Raped women have been divorced by their husbands—who couldn’t bear to live with the awful knowledge, the visions, the possibility that it wasn’t really rape."
"Any lawyer who says there’s no such thing as rape should be hauled out to a public place by three large perverts and buggered at high noon."
"A rapist who confines his lust to middle- and upper-class ladies is on pretty safe ground."
"The rape mania is such a complex phenomenon that it will eventually have to be dealt with by Presidential fiat."
"Hell’s Angels will continue to be arrested for rape with monotonous regularity."
"In July 1966 four Angels went on trial in Sonoma County for the forcible rape—at an Angel party—of a nineteen-year-old San Francisco model."
"The biggest part of the truth lies in the problem of defining an act of rape in terms of what actually happened."
"LSD is a guaranteed cure for boredom, a malady no less prevalent among Hell’s Angels than any other segment of the Great Society."
"Dropping acid with the Angels was an adventure; they were too ignorant to know what to expect, and too wild to care."
"Like price fixing, tax evasion and embezzlement, psychedelic crimes seem to be a vice of the fatter classes."
"In the terms of our Great Society the Hell’s Angels are losers—dropouts, failures and malcontents."
"The Angels are not visionaries, but diehards, and if they are the forerunners or the vanguard of anything it is not the 'moral revolution' in vogue on college campuses, but a fast-growing legion of young unemployables."
"To see the Hell’s Angels as caretakers of the old 'individualist' tradition 'that made this country great' is only a painless way to get around seeing them for what they really are—not some romantic leftover, but the first wave of a future that nothing in our history has prepared us to cope with."
"The Hell’s Angels don’t like being called losers, but they have learned to live with it."
"Their image of themselves derives mainly from Celluloid, from the Western movies and two-fisted TV shows that have taught them most of what they know about the society they live in."
"To them all comparisons are either presumptuous or insulting."
"The streets of every city are thronged with men who would pay all the money they could get their hands on to be transformed—even for a day—into hairy, hard-fisted brutes who walk over cops, extort free drinks from terrified bartenders and thunder out of town on big motorcycles after raping the banker’s daughter."
"Yet it was Tiny who pulled me out of the stomp circle before the others managed to fracture my skull or explode my groin."
"My face looked like it had been jammed into the spokes of a speeding Harley, and the only thing keeping me awake was the spastic pain of a broken rib."