Time & Perspective Quote by Hunter S. Thompson

Thompson’s line lands like a toast that curdles in your mouth: the vocabulary of celebration (“triumph,” “beauty”) is immediately underwritten by the gore of procurement (“trampled”). That hinge is the whole trick. It’s not a neutral observation about history’s “cost.” It’s a deliberately ugly accounting method, the kind of sentence you write when you’re tired of being asked to admire the shiny parts without inspecting the supply chain.

The intent is double-edged. On one side, it’s a cynical corrective to American victory narratives and aesthetic mythology: the parade floats don’t roll without someone getting shoved into the gutter. On the other, it’s a jab at the audience’s complicity. “Many souls” is vague on purpose; it lets the reader fill in whoever they prefer to forget - workers, soldiers, addicts, the politically disposable - then forces them to admit the category is large enough to be convenient.

Contextually, Thompson’s journalism thrived on puncturing the official story, from campaign trail theater to the manic, predatory underside of consumer pleasure. He treated “beauty” not as a sacred object but as a product with a hidden receipt. The sentence is built like moral sabotage: it invites you in with lofty nouns, then swaps in a verb that belongs to mobs and regimes. Triumph and beauty aren’t denied; they’re indicted as achievements that often require a crowd willing to step on a few necks and keep dancing.