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Las Vegas looks the way you'd imagine heaven must look at night.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Invisible Monsters
The reason you should go to Las Vegas is because, for only the second time, the second time, ever, they have rebuilt Sodom and Gomorrah. It's back!! And you have the opportunity to see it before it turns to salt.
LEWIS BLACK, The White Album
Any other town you go to there's this little devil and a little angel on your shoulder. A little good advice, a little bad advice.You go to Las Vegas, there's like a devil and a devil and they're just battling it out the whole time. It's like, "Smoke some crack!" "Get a hooker!" And then I go, "YEA! Yea, this is a good town. Smoke some crack and get a hooker! Alright!"
BILLY BURR, stand-up routine
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but the 400-pound woman perched in front of a slot machine, oozing bum-flesh off her stool as she balanced a cocktail and cigarette in one hand and robotically tugged the slot arm with the other... that's still with me.
BRIAN SACK, Banterist, Jun. 15, 2006
Las Vegas is a resort whose two chief sorces of income are seven and eleven.
EVAN ESAR, 20,000 Quips & Quotes
In the fledgling days of the town, the notorious Block 16 was set aside for card games and prostitution. Sin and commerce have marched hand-in-hand ever since, but this alliance made Las Vegas no more atypical than any other American city of the time. The difference is that Las Vegas extolled with pride what other places sought to hide. To the commonplace culture of heavily populated cities and industrial towns that made up the urban fabric of the country, Las Vegas alone stood as the behavioral "Other," a land where the "victimless" crimes of sex, drink, and gambling were not only condoned, but celebrated.
MARK GOTTDIENER, Las Vegas
Las Vegas exists chiefly to satisfy the needs and desires of its visitors, and this it does in spectacular fashion. Sin City has taken or re-created the best that other great cities have to offer and then upped the ante -- making it bigger, grander, flashier.
SCOTT DOGGETT, Lonely Planet Las Vegas
Las Vegas stinks. It is loud and hot.
JOHN O'BRIEN, Leaving Las Vegas
In Las Vegas, everything takes place as if the absence of any sense of belonging to the environment entailed a hypertrophied sensitivity to details. There is no possibility of visual escape into perceptual horizons of indeterminateness (left-right, forward-back, near-far), but, instead, only the pregnancy of enlarged, exaggerated and highlighted forms. Behind each lit-up sign no space is hollowed out, no incipient world. Everything is there, everything is flat. As thick as the giant advertising billboards that ubiquitously package it, loading it with naïve and comic symbols, crude, schematic messages, Las Vegas is a city of literal superficiality.
In a city of illusion, where change is what the city does, it's no wonder Las Vegas is the court of last resort, the last place to start over, to reinvent yourself in the same way that the city does, time after time. For some it works; for some it doesn't, but they keep coming and trying.
HAL ROTHMAN, Neon Metropolis
Las Vegas weddings are a phenomenon not quite like any other. The industry attracts cheers and jeers, but it touches a couple of hundred thousand people annually on the most important day of their lives.
SUSAN MARG, Las Vegas Weddings
I'd rather be in Las Vegas 104 degrees than New York 90 degrees, you know why? Legalized prostitution. In any weather that takes the edge off.
RAY ROMANO, Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist
Las Vegas is a society of armed masturbators/gambling is the kicker here/sex is extra/weird trip for high rollers ... house-whores for winners, hand jobs for the bad luck crowd.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Contemporary Las Vegas is astonishing. At night, it is a brilliant cluster of jewels of all shapes, sizes, and colors, glowing in the middle of a vast, black velvet canopy. By day, it is also an amazing sight, almost like a mirage. There is nothing but desert and rugged mountains all around, and then--in the middle of it all--one of the largest and fastest growing cities in the United States ... truly an enigma.
THOMAS TAJ AINLAY, Las Vegas: The Fabulous First Century
Las Vegas is a city of kickbacks. A desert city of greased palms. A place where a $20 bill can buy approval, a $100 bill adulation and $1,000 canonization.
I go to Las Vegas--or at least I went to Las Vegas--because even though I knew everything that was sinister, calculating, and evil about it, I loved Las Vegas. Only in Vegas could I dare to fantasize that I was a Friend of Frank. Or that I was throwing the dice at Dino's favorite table. Or that I might luck out and sip bourgon with Rickles after his last lounge show. The D.I. oozed that kind of heady fantasy.
MARC COOPER, The Last Honest Place in America
Las Vegas history, the real Las Vegas history, makes fops and fools of even the most sincere explorers. The city's story is riddled with blind alleys, dead ends, crazy twists, and outright fabrication.
JOHN L. SMITH, foreward, Nevada Yesterdays
Las Vegas is a major family destination. Nevada casinos have become American family values now. It's considered just fine to go into one of these windowless scary gambling-malls, drink yourself silly, lose your ass at roulette, and then go ogle showgirls with breast implants. Republicans do this now. Working-class folks do it in polyester stretch pants. It's normal.
BRUCE STERLING, WIRED Magazine, Nov. 1996
Las Vegas was and is a hard town that will make you pay for your inability to restrain your desires.... If you have a weakness, Las Vegas will punish you.
HAL ROTHMAN, Neon Metropolis
Las Vegas marks itself out by nothingness. All the negative descriptions that can generally be used in labelling a city apply to it, for its absence of consistency actually makes its existence doubtful: no man's land, waste ground, non-place, ghost town, urban simulacrum, nowhere city, etc. For us it is Zeropolis, the non-city which is the very first city, just as zero is the very first number. The nothing that counts, the nothingness of neon.
The city's frightening now. That's the basis of my reaction to Las Vegas. It's not the city I wrote about. It's not the same place at all. You'll notice that even the - what do you call them? - milestone or trademark casinos are now gone.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON, Las Vegas City Life, Jun. 7, 2002
Many a man who goes to Las Vegas to get away from it all soon finds that Las Vegas gets it all away from him.
EVAN ESAR, 20,000 Quips & Quotes
The best thing about Las Vegas is that no one pretends to be responsible for your behavior like they do in the rest of the country. There's no meddling self-righteous liberals or right-wing Christian demagogues telling you that you can't do something fun with your own time and money. If you can afford it, it's yours.
DREW CAREY, Dirty Jokes and Beer
Las Vegas is perhaps the most color-blind, class-free place in America. As long as your cash or credit line holds out, no one gives a damn about your race, gender, national origin, sexual orientation, address, family lineage, voter registration or even your criminal arrest record. Money is the great leveler.
MARC COOPER, The Last Honest Place in America
[Las Vegas] turns women into men, and men into asses.
ALAN KING, quoted in Neon Metropolis
Las Vegas is the only place I know where money really talks--it says, "Goodbye."
FRANK SINATRA, The Joker Is Wild
Las Vegas has changed a lot over the years. It's no longer a mob-controlled adult play-land. Now it's a corporate, family-friendly place where no one bats an eyelid when some schmuck pushes his kid's stroller through the craps tables at 1 a.m. I'm not sure what they call Family Services folks here, but they're probably busy playing Keno anyway.
BRIAN SACK, Banterist, Jun. 15, 2006
In Las Vegas, people seem to believe, the prosperity spawned by tourism and gaming can make them whole, financially and spiritually. Las Vegas now melds fun, work, and wealth, showing a path toward the brightest vistas of the postindustrual world. It is the first city of the twenty-first century.
HAL ROTHMAN, introduction, The Grit Beneath the Glitter
Las Vegas is Everyman’s cut-rate Babylon. Not far away there is, or was, a roadside lunch counter and over it a sign proclaiming in three words that a Roman emperor’s orgy is now a democratic institution…. “Topless Pizza Lunch.”
To most people, Las Vegas is synonymous with gambling and glitter; a slightly, pleasingly sinful fairyland for adults where they can watch the most entertaining performers and biggest names in show business in between bouts of indulging in games of chance that everyone knows favor the house.
CLIFFORD L. LINEDECKER, Blood in the Sand
Vegas is purposefully constructed as a self-enclosed and isolated biosphere, sort of what a recreational colony built on the moon might be like.
MARC COOPER, The Last Honest Place in America
Today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment. Our politics, our religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice.
NEIL POSTMAN, Amusing Ourselves to Death
Las Vegas has become, just as Bugsy Siegel dreamed, the American Monte Carlo—without any of the inevitable upper-class baggage of the Riviera casinos. At Monte Carlo there is still the plush mustiness of the nineteenth century noble lions.... There are still Wrong Forks, Deficient Accents, Poor Tailoring, Gauche Displays, Nouveau Richness, Cultural Aridity—concepts unknown in Las Vegas. For the grand debut of Monte Carlo as a resort in 1879 the architect Charles Garnier designed an opera house for the Place du Casino; and Sarah Bernhardt read a symbolic poem. For the debut of Las Vegas as a resort in 1946 Bugsy Siegel hired Abbot and Costello, and there, in a way, you have it all.
TOM WOLFE, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
If you aim to leave Las Vegas with a small fortune, go there with a large one.
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