Hunter S. Thompson Quotes & Sayings

There is nothing Modern about doing dumb things for dumb reasons. — Hunter S. Thompson

There is probably some long-standing "rule" among writers, journalists, and other word-mongers that says: "When you start stealing from your own work you're in bad trouble." And it may be true. — Hunter S. Thompson

Richard Nixon was an evil man - evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. — Hunter S. Thompson

Sex, drugs, and insanity have always worked for me, but I wouldn't recommend them for everyone. — Hunter S. Thompson

How long, oh Lord, how long? And how much longer will we have to wait before some high-powered shark with a fistful of answers will finally bring us face-to-face with the ugly question that is already so close to the surface in this country, that sooner or later even politicians will have to cope with it? — Hunter S. Thompson

It was wonderful, a stunning happy ending to what began as another tragic rock & roll story, as if Bob Dylan had been arrested in Miami for jacking off in a seedy little XXX theater while stroking the spine of a fat young boy. — Hunter S. Thompson

Nixon was a professional politician, and I despised everything he stood for
but if he were running for president this year against the evil Bush-Cheney gang, I would happily vote for him. — Hunter S. Thompson

When you're asked to stay out of a bar you don't just punch the owner
you come back with your army and tear the place down, destroy the whole edifice and everything it stands for. No compromise. If a man gets wise, mash his face. If a woman snubs you, rape her. This is the thinking, if not the reality, behind the whole Hell's Angels act. — Hunter S. Thompson

No, it was too much. The line between madness and masochism was already hazy; the time had come to pull back ... to retire, hunker down, back off and "cop out," as it were. Why not? in every gig like this, there comes a time to either cut your losses or consolidate your winnings - whichever fits. — Hunter S. Thompson

It was the kind of town that made you feel like Humphrey Bogart: you came in on a bumpy little plane, and, for some mysterious reason, got a private room with balcony overlooking the town and the harbor; then you sat there and drank until something happened. — Hunter S. Thompson

Good mescaline comes on slow. The first hour is all waiting, then about halfway through the second hour you start cursing the creep who burned you, because nothing is happening ... and then ZANG! — Hunter S. Thompson

Platitudes are safe, because they're easy to wink at, but truth is something else again. — Hunter S. Thompson

Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. — Hunter S. Thompson

Arriving half-drunk in a foreign place is hard on the nerves. You have a feeling that something is wrong, that you can't get a grip. — Hunter S. Thompson

The writer must be a participant in the scene ... like a film director who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work, and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least the main character. — Hunter S. Thompson

I learned a long time ago that reality was much weirder than anyone's imagination. — Hunter S. Thompson

There was no time for scholarly details, and, besides, I have always believed that a man can fairly be judged by the standards and taste of his choices in matters of high-level plagiarism. — Hunter S. Thompson

There is a beautiful consistency about Buzzard; he is a porcupine among men, with his quills always flared. If he won a new car with a raffle ticket bought in his name by some momentary girlfriend, he would recognize it at once as a trick to con him out of a license fee. He would denounce the girl as a hired slut, beat up the raffle sponsor, and trade off the car for five hundred Seconals and a gold-handled cattle prod. — Hunter S. Thompson

Pray to God, but row away from the rocks. — Hunter S. Thompson

The first time I managed to pick up a basketball I knew I was destined to lead the UK to another National championship ... Even now, so many years later, I still believe Kentucky will go undefeated in March & win everything. — Hunter S. Thompson

Hey, honkies!" my attorney screamed. "Goddamnit, I'm serious! I want to sell you some pure fuckin' smack! — Hunter S. Thompson

My attorney put down the phone after making several calls. "There's only one place where we can get fresh salmon," he said, "and it's closed on Sunday." "Of course," I snapped. "These goddamn Jesus freaks! They're multiplying like rats! — Hunter S. Thompson

Without gambling, I would not exist. — Hunter S. Thompson

Weird behavior is natural in smart children, like curiosity is to a kitten. — Hunter S. Thompson

All my life, my heart has sought a thing I cannot name.
Remembered line from a long-
forgotten poem — Hunter S. Thompson

The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon. Probably at the next gas station. — Hunter S. Thompson

We can't stop here, this is bat country! — Hunter S. Thompson

The crazy never die. — Hunter S. Thompson

Rude people will now & then ask me why I think I know so much about Politics. I tell them it's because I'm Smart ... But that is a lie: The real reason is because I'm an incurable Gambling addict. — Hunter S. Thompson

As your attorney I advise you to get the chiliburger. It's a hamburger with chili on it. — Hunter S. Thompson

I'll call New York for some cash. — Hunter S. Thompson

No doubt they all Got What Was Coming To Them. 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 somebodyor at least some force is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel. This is the same cruel and paradoxically benevolent bullshit that has kept the Catholic Church going for so many centuries. — Hunter S. Thompson

It is not necessary to accept the choices handed down to you by life as you know it. — Hunter S. Thompson

The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage & whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy - then go back to the office & sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece. — Hunter S. Thompson

So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed? — Hunter S. Thompson

There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die. — Hunter S. Thompson

I have never seen much point in getting heavy with stupid people or Jesus freaks, just as long as they don't bother me. In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone. They will not inherit the earth, but then neither will I ... And I have learned to live, as it were, with the idea that I will never find peace and happiness, either. But as long as I know there's a pretty good chance I can get my hands on either one of them every once in a while, I do the best I can between high spots. — Hunter S. Thompson

I am not a yachting person, by nature, but I have just enough experience on the sea under sail to feel a certain nostalgia for it when I see a big white racing yacht heeled over at cruising speed on the ocean, and I can still tie a mean bowline knot on just about anything in less than 10 seconds. — Hunter S. Thompson

Some book reviewer whose name I forget recently called me a 'vicious misanthrope' ... or maybe it was a 'cynical misanthrope' ... but either way, he (or she) was right; and what got me this way was politics. — Hunter S. Thompson

Poor Williams was left holding the civic bag; he had taken a gutsy stand, his image was all moxie . . . and on Monday night, when the Angels were finally gone, he had earned the leisure that enabled him to go out to the lakefront and gaze off in a proud wistful way, like Gatsby, at the green neon lights of the tavern across the water, where the others were counting their money. — Hunter S. Thompson

Two glasses of ice water--with ice. — Hunter S. Thompson

Every time I think of Tim Leary I get angry. He was a liar and a quack and a worse human being than Richard Nixon. For the last twenty-six years of his life he worked as an informant for the FBI and turned his friends into the police and betrayed the peace symbol he hid behind. — Hunter S. Thompson

It drops us into a vigorous current, a constant state of misguided control. The doomed generation takes a final step forward, ignoring all the signs that state the obvious, and leaps into a trip no drug known to man could ever encompass. — Hunter S. Thompson

Football fans share a universal language that cuts across many cultures and many personality types. A serious football fan is never alone. We are legion, and football is often the only thing we have in common. — Hunter S. Thompson

If we get chased out of Iraq with our tail between our legs, that will be the fifth consecutive Third-world country with no hint of a Navy or an Air Force to have whipped us in the past 40 years. — Hunter S. Thompson

I had been up all night with my old friend Allen Ginsberg, the poet, and we had both slid into the abyss of whiskey madness and full-bore substance abuse. It was wonderful, — Hunter S. Thompson

We must have football. What would this country be without football in October? — Hunter S. Thompson

Everybody has the same chance but you need to be rich ... — Hunter S. Thompson

Every now and then you run up on one of those days when everything's in vain ... a stone bummer from start to finish; and if you know what's good for you, on days like these you sort of hunker down in a safe corner and watch. — Hunter S. Thompson

I feel The Fear coming on, and the only cure for that is to chew up a fat black wad of blood-opium about the size of a young meatball and then call a cab for a fast run down to that strip of X-film houses on 14th Street ... peel back the brain, let the opium take hold, and get locked into serious pornography. — Hunter S. Thompson

The mind and body must be subjected to extreme stimulus, by means of drugs and music. — Hunter S. Thompson

Hubert Humphrey is a treacherous, gutless old ward-heeler who should be put in a goddamn bottle and sent out with the Japanese current. — Hunter S. Thompson

In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone. — Hunter S. Thompson

I think I'm one of the most patriotic people that I've ever encountered in America. I consider myself a bedrock patriot. I participate very actively in local politics, because my voice might be worthwhile. I participate in a meaningful way - not by donations; I work at it. — Hunter S. Thompson

You won't find reasonable men on the tops of tall mountains. — Hunter S. Thompson

Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together. — Hunter S. Thompson

He talked about luck and fate and numbers coming up, yet he never ventured a nickel at the casinos because he knew the house had all the percentages. And beneath his pessimism, his bleak conviction that all the machinery was rigged against him, at the bottom of his soul was a faith that he was going to outwit it, that by carefully watching the signs he was going to know when to dodge and be spared. It was fatalism with a loophole, and all you had to do to make it work was never miss a sign. Survival by coordination, as it were. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who can see it coming and jump aside. Like a frog evading a shillelagh in a midnight marsh. — Hunter S. Thompson

Say,' I said. "What brings you out here at this hour of the morning, for a thing like this?"

'The bus,' he said. — Hunter S. Thompson

He wandered into the Newsroom and asked for a job the same way he'd walk into a barbershop and ask for a haircut, and with no more idea of being turned down. — Hunter S. Thompson

February is always a bad month for TV sports. Football is gone, basketball is plodding along in the annual midseason doldrums, and baseball is not even mentioned. — Hunter S. Thompson

There's a terrible danger in voting for the lesser of two evils because the parties can set it up that way. — Hunter S. Thompson

The motorcycle is obviously a sexual symbol. It's what's called a phallic locomotor symbol. It's an extension of one's body, a power between one's legs.
-Dr. Bernard Diamond, University of California
criminologist, 1965 — Hunter S. Thompson

They command a fascination, however reluctant, that borders on psychic masturbation. — Hunter S. Thompson

I measure my life in pages. If I have pages at dawn, it's been a good night. — Hunter S. Thompson

Paranoia is just another word for ignorance. — Hunter S. Thompson

"Drugs" are not necessarily narcotics. The narcotic is one type of drug and coffee is a drug ... booze is a drug ... many drugs ... They're all around us. — Hunter S. Thompson

Chicago - this vicious, stinking zoo, this mean-grinning, Mace-smelling boneyard of a city; an elegant rockpile monument to everything cruel and stupid and corrupt in the human spirit. — Hunter S. Thompson

Words are such a poor medium when you really want someone to feel something. — Hunter S. Thompson

We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear - fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer. — Hunter S. Thompson

Cover a war in a place where you can't drink beer or talk to a woman? Hell no! — Hunter S. Thompson

Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel. I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio. — Hunter S. Thompson

Young George spent more money on one day of his Inauguration Ceremonies than Richard Nixon did on his whole Campaign in 1972 - and Nixon was crucified as a Criminal Spendthrift with the ethics of a snake. — Hunter S. Thompson

This is the main advantage of ether: it makes you behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel ... total loss of all basic motor skills: Blurred vision, no balance, numb tongue - severance of all connection between the body and the brain. Which is interesting, because the brain continues to function more or less normally ... you can actually watch yourself behaving in the terrible way, but you can't control it. — Hunter S. Thompson

There is a progression of understanding vis-a-vis pro football that varies drastically with the factor of distance
physical, emotional, intellectual and every other way. Which is exactly the way it should be, in the eyes of the amazingly small number of people who own and control the game, because it is this finely managed distance factor that accounts for the high-profit mystique that blew the sacred institution of baseball off its 'national pastime' pedestal in less than fifteen years. — Hunter S. Thompson

This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "conciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously. After West Point and the Priesthood, LSD must have seemed entirely logical to him ... but there is not much satisfaction in knowing that he blew it very badly for himself, because he took too many others down with him. — Hunter S. Thompson

Call on God, but row away from the rocks. — Hunter S. Thompson

Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush?
They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us -- they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis.

And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them. — Hunter S. Thompson

The Jews don't beleive in Jesus! Why should I?! WHOOOEEEE!! — Hunter S. Thompson

Every deadline was a crisis ... No doubt it has something to do with a deep-seated personality defect, or maybe a kink in whatever blood vessel leads into the pineal gland ... On the other hand, it might easily be something as simple and basically perverse as whatever instinct it is that causes a jackrabbit to wait until the last possible second to dart across the road in front of a speeding car. — Hunter S. Thompson

You have to be very mean to get a laugh on the campaign trail. There is no such thing as paranoia. — Hunter S. Thompson

That was always the difference between Muhammad Ali and the rest of us. He came, he saw, and if he didn't entirely conquer - he came as close as anybody we are likely to see in the lifetime of this doomed generation. — Hunter S. Thompson

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. — Hunter S. Thompson

The best thing about the Kentucky Derby is that it is only two minutes long. It is the quickest event in sports, except for Sumo-wrestling & Mike Tyson fights. Maybe Drag-racing is quicker, but I have never been attracted to it. — Hunter S. Thompson

Richard Nixon has never been one of my favorite people, anyway. For years I've regarded his very existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad. — Hunter S. Thompson

Who said anything about slicing you up? ... I just wanted to carve a little Z on your forehead
nothing serious. — Hunter S. Thompson

There was also the fact that sending a penniless writer to get $135 worth of beer was - as Khrushchev said of Nixon - 'like sending a goat to tend the cabbage'. — Hunter S. Thompson

Children are like TV sets. When they start acting weird, whack them across the head with a big rubber basketball shoe. — Hunter S. Thompson

The point is valid: the difference between survival and wipe-out in a physical crisis is nearly always a matter of conditioned reflexes. — Hunter S. Thompson

When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional. — Hunter S. Thompson

The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason. — Hunter S. Thompson

Yes sir, I am a tortured man for all seasons, as they say, and I have powerful friends in high places. Birds sing where I walk, and children smile when they see me coming. — Hunter S. Thompson

When you write for a living and you can't do anything else, you know that sooner or later that the deadline is going to come screaming down on you like a goddamn banshee. There's no avoiding it ... So one day you just don't appear at the El Adobe bar anymore; you shut the door, paint the windows black, rent an electric typewriter and become the monster you always were - the writer. — Hunter S. Thompson

Because it is a very elegant feeling to wake up in the morning and go down to your neighborhood polling place and come away feeling proud of the way you voted. — Hunter S. Thompson

Fishing from a boat seems like dilettante bullshit - like hunting wild boar with a can of spray paint from the safety of a pick-up truck — Hunter S. Thompson

People who claim to know jackrabbits will tell you they are primarily motivated by Fear, Stupidity, and Craziness. But I have spent enough time in jack rabbit country to know that most of them lead pretty dull lives; they are bored with their daily routines: eat, fuck, sleep, hop around a bush now and then ... No wonder some of them drift over the line into cheap thrills once in a while; there has to be a powerful adrenalin rush in crouching by the side of a road, waiting for the next set of headlights to come along, then streaking out of the bushes with split-second timing and making it across to the other side just inches in front of the speeding front wheels — Hunter S. Thompson

We came out here to find the American Dream, and now that we're right in the vortex you want to quit ... You must realize that we've found the main nerve."
I know," he said. "That's what gives me the Fear. — Hunter S. Thompson

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 to 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 that Light at the end of the tunnel. — Hunter S. Thompson

Justice is expensive in America. There are no Free Passes ... You might want to remember this, the next time you get careless and blow off a few Parking Tickets. They will come back to haunt you the next time you see a Cop car in your rear-view mirror. — Hunter S. Thompson

All around us were people I had spent ten years avoiding
shapeless women in wool bathing suits, dull-eyed men with hairless legs and self-conscious laughs, all Americans, all fearsomely alike. These people should be kept at home, I thought; lock them in the basement of some goddamn Elks Club and keep them pacified with erotic movies; if they want a vacation, show them a foreign art film; and if they still aren't satisfied, send them into the wilderness and run them with vicious dogs. — Hunter S. Thompson

The Oakland chapter's "bondsman" is a handsome middle-aged woman with platinum-blond hair named Dorothy Connors. She has a pine-paneled office, drives a white Cadillac and treats the Angels gently, like wayward children. "These boys are the backbone of the bail-bond business," she says. "Ordinary customers come and go, but just like clockwork, the Angels come down to my office each week to make their payments. They really pay the overhead. — Hunter S. Thompson