Hunter S Thompson Journalism Quotes & Sayings

Journalism is a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world of misfits and drunkards and failures. — Hunter S. Thompson

The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America (is that it) has its roots in the clubby/cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between politicians and journalists. — Hunter S. Thompson

Don't judge your taco by its price — Hunter S. Thompson

The only thing I ever saw that came close to Objective Journalism was a closed-circuit TV setup that watched shoplifters in the General Store at Woody Creek, Colorado. — Hunter S. Thompson

Suddenly I was tired of Lotterman; he was a phony and he didn't even know it. He was forever yapping about freedom of the press and keeping the paper going, but if he'd had a million dollars and all the freedom in the world he'd still put out a worthless newspaper because he wasn't smart enough to put out a good one. He was just another noisy little punk in the great legion of punks who marched between the banners of bigger and better men. Freedom, Truth, Honour - you could rattle off a hundred such words and behind every one of them would gather a thousand punks, pompous little farts, waving the banner with one hand and reaching under the table with the other.
I stood up. "Ed," I said using his name for the first time, "I believe I'll quit. — Hunter S. Thompson

Fiction is a bridge to the truth that journalism can't reach. — Hunter S. Thompson

I always lamented that I wasn't a writer during the late '60s and the early '70s, with the New Journalism and Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson and all those people. — Meghan Daum

Gonzo journalism is a style of reporting based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism ... — Hunter S. Thompson

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism
which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. — Hunter S. Thompson

We have bigger things to brood on and enormous reasons for wallowing in terminal craziness until we finally hit bottom. — Hunter S. Thompson

I've already become a mastodon in print - I don't see a consciousness for my kind of journalism. — Hunter S. Thompson

If you consider the great journalists in history, you don't see too many objective journalists on that list. — Hunter S. Thompson

What sells, today, is whatever Fucks You Up - whatever short-circuits your brain and grounds it out for the longest possible time. — Hunter S. Thompson

They would owe most of their success to a curious rape mania that rides on the shoulder of American journalism like some jeering, masturbating raven.
Nothing grabs an editor's eye like a good rape. — Hunter S. Thompson

The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits - a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage. — 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

I don't think that my kind of journalism has ever been universally popular. It's lonely out here. — Hunter S. Thompson

You will be flogged for being right and flogged for being wrong, and it hurts both ways
but it doesn't hurt as much when you're right. — Hunter S. Thompson

With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms. — Hunter S. Thompson

The only way to write honestly about the scene is to be part of it. If there is one quick truism about psychedelic drugs, it is that anyone who tries to write about them without first-expierience is a fool and a fraud. — Hunter S. Thompson

I can't think in terms of journalism without thinking in terms of political ends. Unless there's been a reaction, there's been no journalism. It's cause and effect. — Hunter S. Thompson

We are drifting into some ugly parallels here, and if I'd written this kind of thing two years ago I'd pick up the New York Times and see myself mangled all over the Op-Ed page... And then beaten into a bloody coma the next evening by some hired thugs in an alley behind the National Press Building..... — Hunter S. Thompson

If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism. — Hunter S. Thompson

Objective journalism is one of the main reasons that American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long. — Hunter S. Thompson

How long can we maintain? I wonder. How long before one of us starts raving and jabbering at this boy? What will he think then? This same lonely desert was the last known home of the Manson family. Will he make that grim connection.. — Hunter S. Thompson

As far as I'm concerned, it's a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity. — Hunter S. Thompson