Hunter S. Thompson Quotes

337 Sourced Quotes

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
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
In the meantime, I would drink, rest, and ponder the meaning of this mob.

Hunter S. Thompson
I am more than just a serious basketball fan. I am a life-long addict. I was addicted from birth, in fact, because I was born in Kentucky and I learned, early on, that Habitual Domination was a natural way of life.

Hunter S. Thompson
Jesus, I thought, I am ripped right straight to the tits. Where am I? Are we going up or down? Somewhere in the back of my brain, I knew I was sitting in a jeep in the parking lot of a night club on an island off the Mexican coast — but how could I really be sure, with another part of my brain apparently convinced that I was looking down on the huge glittering bowl of Los Angeles from the cockpit of a 727? Was that the Milky Way? Or Sunset Boulevard? Orion, or the Beverly Hills Hotel?

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
Ed: Rip up the streets?
HST: With jackhammers.
Ed: With jackhammers?

Hunter S. Thompson
I knew a Buddhist once, and I've hated myself ever since. The whole thing was a failure.

Hunter S. Thompson
I am a generous man, by nature, and far more trusting than I should be. Indeed. The real world is risky territory for people with generosity of spirit. Beware.

Hunter S. Thompson
In four short years he has turned our country from a prosperous nation at peace into a desperately indebted nation at war. But so what? He is the President of the United States, and you're not. Love it or leave it.

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
Journalism, to me, is just another drug - a free ride to scenes I'd probably miss if I stayed straight.

Hunter S. Thompson
It was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool full of mermaids.

Hunter S. Thompson
I like this place he said with a grin I like to sit up here and look down at the beach and think of all the good things I could do with a Luger.

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
The slow-rising central horror of "Watergate" is not that it might grind down to the reluctant impeachment of a vengeful thug of a president whose entire political career has been a monument to the same kind of cheap shots and treachery he finally got nailed for, but that we might somehow fail to learn something from it.

Hunter S. Thompson
I harbor a secret urge to whack a salesman in the face, crack his teeth and put red bumps around his eyes.

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

Hunter S. Thompson
There was something... total... something very undermining about the McGovern defeat... There was a very unexplained kind of... ominous quality to it... weeping chaos. People you'd never expect to break down... stumbled off the plane in tears... It was such a shock to me that although I'd gone back to Washington to analyze... I saw how ripped up people were... I decided to hell with this... So I just went right around to the main terminal and got on another plane and went back to Colorado.

Hunter S. Thompson
It is hard to ignore the prima facie dumbness that got us bogged down in this nasty war in the first place. This is not going to be like Daddy's War, old sport. He actually won, and he still got run out of the White House nine months later... The whole thing sucks. It was wrong from the start, and it is getting wronger by the hour.

Hunter S. Thompson
There is nothing so unusual, they tell me, about coming back to your car and finding the radio aerial torn off, the windshield wipers bent up in the air like spaghetti, and all the windows smashed... for no particular reason except to make sure you know just exactly where it's at these days. Where indeed?

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
It is like sitting in a traffic jam on the San Diego Freeway with your windows rolled up and Portuguese music booming out of the surround-sound speakers while animals gnaw on your neck and diseased bill collectors hammer on your doors with golf clubs.

Hunter S. Thompson
But our trip was different. It was a classic affirmation of everything right and true and decent in the national character. It was a gross, physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country-but only for those with true grit. And we were chock full of that.

Hunter S. Thompson
I had come to regard him as a loner with no real past and a future so vague there was no sense talking about it.

Hunter S. Thompson
Luck is a very thin wire between survival and disaster, and not many people can keep their balance on it.

Hunter S. Thompson
I may sound a little black, but I'm really pretty well adjusted.

Hunter S. Thompson
There are many harsh lessons to be learned from the gambling experience, but the harshest one of all is the difference between having Fun and being Smart.

Hunter S. Thompson
Most people who deal in words don't have much faith in them and I am no exception — especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they are scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.

Hunter S. Thompson
A man who has blown all his options can't afford the luxury of changing his ways. He has to capitalize on whatever he has left, and he can't afford to admit — no matter how often he's reminded of it — that every day of his life takes him farther and farther down a blind alley…

Hunter S. Thompson