Hunter S. Thompson Quotes

There may be flies on you and me, but there are no flies on Jesus.

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.

Marathon running, like golf, is a game for players, not winners. That is why Callaway sells golf clubs and Nike sells running shoes. But running is unique in that the world's best racers are on the same course, at the same time, as amateurs, who have as much chance of winning as your average weekend warrior would scoring a touchdown in the NFL.

People think I watch TV too much, but they are wrong. There is a huge difference between merely "watching" TV and learning to respond aggressively to it. The difference, for most people, is the difference between the living and dying of their own brains.

I am not a yachting person, by nature, but I have just enough experience on the sea under sail to feel a certain nostalgia for it when I see a big white racing yacht heeled over at cruising speed on the ocean, and I can still tie a mean bowline knot on just about anything in less than 10 seconds.

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.

Richard Nixon has never been one of my favorite people anyway. For years I've regarded his existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad. The Nixon I remembered was absolutely humorless; I couldn't imagine him laughing at anything except maybe a paraplegic who wanted to vote Democratic but couldn't quite reach the lever on the voting machine.

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

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.

Sometimes you're fooled quickly. You want to be fooled. If you can't trust your first impression you're going to have a harder time than you should.

I'll call New York for some cash.

Beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life.

To give advice to a man who asks what to do with his life implies something very close to egomania. To presume to point a man to the right and ultimate goal - to point with a trembling finger in the RIGHT direction is something only a fool would take upon himself.

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.

Kill the body and the head will die.

As I see it then, the formula runs something like this: a man must choose a path which will let his ABILITIES function at maximum efficiency toward the gratification of his DESIRES.

Smart people understand that there is no such thing as paranoia. It is just another mask for ignorance.

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

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.

The room was very quiet. I walked over to the TV set and turned it on to a dead channel-white noise at maximum decibels, a fine sound for sleeping, a powerful continuous hiss to drown out everything strange.

What the hell is the sense of trying to hold the Democratic party together, if it's really a party of expediency, something that's put together every four years?

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?

We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws.

The mind of America is seized by a fatal dry rot - and it's only a question of time before all that the mind controls will run amuck in a frenzy of stupid, impotent fear.

When you write for a living and you can't do anything else, you know that sooner or later that the deadline is going to come screaming down on you like a goddamn banshee. There's no avoiding it...So one day you just don't appear at the El Adobe bar anymore; you shut the door, paint the windows black, rent an electric typewriter and become the monster you always were - the writer.

We came down here to see this teddible scene: people all pissed out of their minds and vomiting on themselves and all that and now, you know what? It's us

I measure my life in pages. If I have pages at dawn, it's been a good night.

Morality is temporary, wisdom is permanent.

My blood is too thick for California: I have never been able to properly explain myself in this climate.

I wasn't trying to be an outlaw writer. I never heard of that term; somebody else made it up. But we were all outside the law: Kerouac, Miller, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kesey; I didn't have a gauge as to who was the worst outlaw. I just recognized allies: my people.

A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.

Sane is rich and powerful. Insane is wrong and poor and weak. The rich are free, the poor are put in cages. Res Ipsa Loquitur, amen. Mahalo.

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.

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.

Not everybody is comfortable with the idea that politics is a guilty addiction. But it is.

There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death?

They don't hardly make 'em like him any more - but just to be on the safe side, he should be castrated anyway.

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

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

Ah, that we lack the courage of our romantic convictions; and thereby miss the wine of life, forgoing the very thing that makes living worthwhile.

I don't mean to say that I'm about to state my credo here on this page, but merely to affirm, sincerely for the first time in my life, my belief in man as an individual and independent entity. Certainly not independence in the everyday sense of the word, but pertaining to a freedom and mobility of thought that few people are able - or even have the courage - to achieve.

I noticed at once that Depp had a dangerously energized intelligence . . . He was a suave little brute, but he had a wicked sense of humor and a rare instinct for escalation.

A little bit of this town goes a very long way.

Without gambling, I would not exist.

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

I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I felt that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actor, kidding ourselves on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between those two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going.

And that, I think, was the handle--that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting--on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark--the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

I feel the same way about disco as I do about herpes.