Hunter S. Thompson Quotes

337 Sourced Quotes

It was obvious that he was a man who marched through life to the rhythms of some drum I would never hear.

Hunter S. Thompson
But wow! This goofy child president we have on our hands now. He is demonstrably a fool and a failure, and this is only the summer of '03. The American nation is in the worst condition I can remember in my lifetime, and our prospects for the immediate future are even worse... The Bush family must be very proud of themselves today, but I am not. Big Darkness, soon come. Take my word for it.

Hunter S. Thompson
Coming of age in a fascist police state will not be a barrel of fun for anybody, much less for people like me, who are not inclined to suffer Nazis gladly and feel only contempt for the cowardly flag-suckers who would gladly give up their outdated freedom to live for the mess of pottage they have been conned into believing will be freedom from fear.

Hunter S. Thompson
Good news is rare these days, and every glittering ounce of it should be cherished and hoarded and worshipped and fondled like a priceless diamond.

Hunter S. Thompson
In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.

Hunter S. Thompson
I have learned, in my life and work as a sportswriter, that big-time Sports and big-time Politics are not so far apart in America. They are both a means to the same end, which is victory... And why not? Victory is good for you, and don't let anybody tell you different.

Hunter S. Thompson
Jack Kerouac influenced me quite a bit as a writer... in the Arab sense that the enemy of my enemy was my friend.

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
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
An outlaw can be defined as somebody who lives outside the law, beyond the law and not necessarily against it.

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
He had come so far from himself that I don't think he knew who he was anymore.

Hunter S. Thompson
I'm a word freak. I like words. I've always compared writing to music. That's the way I feel about good paragraphs. When it really works, it's like music.

Hunter S. Thompson
This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed — for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it. Now.

Hunter S. Thompson
Just heard Gen. White's proclamation that we "have Russia zeroed in from all directions." I am waiting now for Vannevar Bush and Ed Teller to announce that our new supersensitive radar picked up a rash of heart tremors from the direction of the USSR, immediately after White's remarkably insignificant statement, I could almost hear Karl Marx laughing in his tomb.

Hunter S. Thompson
Walk tall, kick ass, learn to speak Arabic, love music and never forget you come from a long line of truth seekers, lovers and warriors.

Hunter S. Thompson
When I went into the clinic last April 30, George Bush was about 50 points ahead of his closest Democratic opponent in next year's Presidential Election. When I finally escaped from the horrible place, less than three weeks later, Bush's job-approval ratings had been cut in half — and even down into single digits, in some states — and the Republican Party was panicked and on the run. It was a staggering reversal in a very short time, even shorter than it took for his equally crooked father to drop from 93 percent approval, down to as low as 43 percent and even 41 percent in the last doomed days of the first doomed Bush Administration. After that, he was Bill Clinton's punching bag.

Hunter S. Thompson
I take no pleasure in being Right in my dark predictions about the fate of our military intervention in the heart of the Muslim world. It is immensely depressing to me. Nobody likes to be betting against the Home team.

Hunter S. Thompson
What the hell is going on here? How could this once-proud nation have changed so much, so drastically, in only a little more than two years. In what seems like the blink of an eye, this George Bush has brought us from a prosperous nation at peace to a broke nation at war.

Hunter S. Thompson
I drink much less than most people think, and I think much more than most people would believe. I am quite sincere about some of the things that people take very lightly, and almost insultingly unconcerned about some of the things which most people take seriously. In short, I am basically antisocial: certainly not to an alarming degree, but just more so than I appear to be.

Hunter S. Thompson
We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and - in spite of True Romance magazines - we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way.

Hunter S. Thompson
I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger: A man on the move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.

Hunter S. Thompson
I sat there for a long time, and thought about a lot of things. Foremost among them was the suspicion that my strange and ungovernable instincts might do me in before I had a chance to get rich. No matter how much I wanted those things that I needed money to buy, there was some devilish current pushing me off in another direction — toward anarchy, poverty and craziness. That maddening delusion that a man can lead a decent life without hiring himself out as a Judas goat.

Hunter S. Thompson
It was a maddening image and the only way to whip it was to hang on until dusk and banish the ghosts with rum.

Hunter S. Thompson
In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile – and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely. We owe that to ourselves and our crippled self-image as something better than a nation of panicked sheep.

Hunter S. Thompson
I believe the Republicans have never thought that democracy was anything but a tribal myth.

Hunter S. Thompson
I will fight for your right to be weird- just as I know you will fight for mine.

Hunter S. Thompson
The kids are turned off from politics, they say. Most of 'em don't even want to hear about it. All they want to do these days is lie around on waterbeds and smoke that goddamn marrywanna... yeah, and just between you and me Fred thats probably all for the best.

Hunter S. Thompson
If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

Hunter S. Thompson
And in fact the only way I can deal with this eerie situation at all is to make a conscious decision that I have already lived and finished the life I planned to live - and everything from now on will be A New Life, a different thing, a gig that ends tonight and starts tomorrow morning.

Hunter S. Thompson