Hal Rothman Self Quotations

Las Vegas is the therapeutic ethos of our time run amok, our socio-psychological promise to ourselves to be eternally young writ large on the landscape of aging self-indulgence.

The reinvention of American culture as purely the self catapulted Las Vegas to prominence. The city took sin and made it choice -- a sometimes ambiguous choice, but choice nonetheless. Combined with a visionary approach to experience that melded Hollywood and Americans' taste for comfort and self-deception, Las Vegas grew into the last American frontier city, as foreign at times as Prague but as quintessential as Peoria. In Las Vegas, you can choose your fantasy; in the rest of America, you don't always get to pick.