Hunter S. Thompson Quotes

Hunter S. Thompson Quotes

Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!

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

I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me

I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking - which is fun only for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling. Nothing is fun when you have to do it - over and over, again and again...

It was almost May. I knew that New York was getting warm now, that London was wet, that Rome was hot - and I was on Vieques, where it was always hot and where New York and London and Rome were just names on a map.

A word to the wise is infuriating.

This is the fast lane, folks...and some of us like it here.

Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.

No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well...maybe chalk it off to forced conscious expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten.

When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.

Faster, Faster, until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death.

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.

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.

Across the board... Not junkies or freaks, but people who were just as comfortable with drugs like weed, booze, or coke as we are - and we're not weird, are we? Hell no, we're just overworked professionals who need to relax now and then, have a bit of the whoop and the giggle, right?

Morality is temporary, wisdom is permanent.

Sane is rich and powerful; Insane is wrong and poor and weak. The rich are free, the poor put in cages.

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?

No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun - for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax - This won't hurt

What do you want? Where's the goddamn ice I ordered? Where's the booze? There's a war on, man! People are being killed!

Oral Roberts is a greed-crazed white-trash lunatic who should have been hung upside down from a telephone pole on the outskirts of Tulsa 44 years ago, before he somehow transmogrified into the money-sucking animal that he became when he discovered television.

If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up.

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.

America...just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable

For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.

Call on God, but row away from the rocks.

Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube.

Writing is the flip side of sex - it's only good when it's over.

In a nation run 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.

The waitress had the appearance of a very old hooker who had finally found her place in life

So much for Objective Journalism. Don't bother to look for it here-not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. 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.

Politics is the Art of Controlling Your Enviroment.

The brutal reality of politics would be probably intolerable without drugs.

Liberalism itself has failed, and for a pretty good reason. It has been too often compromised by the people who represented it.

McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for.

Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?

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

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. They worship money and power and death. Their ideal solution to all the nation’s problems would be another 100 Year War.

To crank up a noisy bad stance out in a place like San Francisco and start yelling about “getting things done in Washington” is like sitting far back in the end zone seats at the Super Bowl and screaming at the Miami linebackers “Stop Duane Thomas!

When the going gets tough, the weird turn pro.

Sex without love is as hollow and ridiculous as love without sex.

A man can live on his wits and his balls for only so long.

I felt a tremendous distance between me and everything real.

Successful con men are treated with considerable respect in the South. A good slice of the settler population of that region were men who'd been given a choice between being shipped off to the New World in leg-irons and spending the rest of their lives in English prisons.

Publishers are notoriously slothful about numbers, unless they're attached to dollar signs - unlike journalists, quarterbacks, and felony criminal defendants who tend to be keenly aware of numbers at all times.

Everybody has the same chance but you need to be rich...

This place is like the Army: the shark ethic prevails-eat the wounded. 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.

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