Quotes of jaded idealism

Was reading something that evoked several quotes from different sources to similar effect...thought I would jot them down:

We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60's. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously... All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody... or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.

-- Hunter Thompson via Raoul Duke
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

...San Francisco and its ghosts. San Francisco and its frozen revolution. Once again a time in San Francisco, the city of all excesses and the wildest orgies -- the city, too, it should be said in passing, where, in one night, in a former garage at the intersection of Union and Fillmore, the literary generation was born that, from Kerouac to Lamantia, from Michale McClure to Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder, most transformed America, and thus the world, for half a century. Now this city has become a conservatory of audacity, a museum of successful liberations, a tomb for 300,000 activists, escapes from the merry apocalypse of the sixties -- the proof, again, that the time has come in America to choose between reality and commemoration, between the position of the living and that of the survivor.

-- Bernard-Henri Levy
American Vertigo

What I feel is a sense of betrayal by my species and by my culture -- that they lost their way and misled me, too, to a degree.

-- George Carlin, interview with Salon