Hunter S. Thompson Quotes

337 Sourced Quotes

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
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.

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
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

Hunter S. Thompson
Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole life-style a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect.

Hunter S. Thompson
There was an awful suspicion in my mind that I'd finally gone over the hump, and the worst thing about it was that I didn't feel tragic at all, but only weary, and sort of comfortably detached.

Hunter S. Thompson
The importance of Liking Yourself is a notion that fell heavily out of favour during the coptic, anti-ego frenzy of the acid era — but nobody guessed back then that the experiment might churn up this kind of hangover; a whole subculture of frightened illiterates with no faith in anything.

Hunter S. Thompson
I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than anything else in the English language - and it is not because I am a biblical scholar, or because of any religious faith, but because I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music.

Hunter S. Thompson
I tend to sweat heavily in warm climates. My clothes are soaking wet from dawn to dusk. This worried me at first, but when I went to a doctor and described my normal daily intake of booze, drugs and poison he told me to come back when the sweating stopped.

Hunter S. Thompson
Disgusting as he usually was, on rare occasions he showed flashes of stagnant intelligence. But his brain was so rotted with drink and dissolute living that whenever he put it to work it behaved like an old engine that had gone haywire from being dipped in lard.

Hunter S. Thompson
All the blood is drained out of democracy - it dies - when only half the population votes.

Hunter S. Thompson
There is something fresh and crisp about the first hours of a Caribbean day, a happy anticipation that something is about to happen, maybe just up the street or around the next corner.

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
Richard Nixon was a criminally insane Monster - Bill Clinton is a black-hearted Swine of a friend.

Hunter S. Thompson
Even that far-left radical bastard George S. McGovern — babbling a maddening litany of his most Far Out ideas — would be hard pressed to crank up a more than 30% animosity quotient.

Hunter S. Thompson
No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough.

Hunter S. Thompson
The hard core, the outlaw elite, were the Hell's Angels... wearing the winged death's-head on the back of their sleeveless jackets and packing their "mamas" behind them on big "chopped hogs." They rode with a fine unwashed arrogance, secure in their reputation as the rottenest motorcycle gang in the whole history of Christendom.

Hunter S. Thompson
Sex without love is as hollow and ridiculous as love without sex.

Hunter S. Thompson
He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time.

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. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

Hunter S. Thompson
Right' i said. 'but first, we need the car. and after that, the cocaine. and then the tape recorder, for special music, and some acapulco shirts.

Hunter S. Thompson
It was wonderful, a stunning happy ending to what began as just 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
Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist, you have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it.

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
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
On some days you get what you want, and on others, you get what you need.

Hunter S. Thompson
I miss Nixon. Compared to these Nazis we have in the White House now, Richard Nixon was a flaming liberal.

Hunter S. Thompson
The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don't mind admitting it.

Hunter S. Thompson
It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy … We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows?

Hunter S. Thompson
The sporting editors had also given me $300 in cash, most of which was already spent on extremely dangerous drugs. The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab.

Hunter S. Thompson