Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention to arrive safely in a pretty and well
preserved body; but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and
loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a ride!'”
– Hunter S. Thompson
If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.
– Hunter S. Thompson
There is an ancient Celtic axiom that says “Good people drink good beer.” Which is true, then
as now. Just look around you in any public barroom and you will quickly see: Bad people drink
bad beer. Think about it.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Never turn your back on Fear. It should always be in front of you, like a thing that might
have to be killed. My father taught me that, along with a few other things that have kept
my life interesting.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Sex without love is as hollow and ridiculous as love without sex.
– Hunter S. Thompson
I wouldn’t recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they’ve always worked for me.
– 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
I’m a relatively respectable citizen. Multiple felon perhaps, but certainly not dangerous.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide,
the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men’s reality.
Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that
the tyranny of “the rat race” is not yet final.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Call on God, but row away from the rocks.
– Hunter S. Thompson
All political power comes from the barrel of either guns, pussy, or opium pipes, and people
seem to like it that way.
– Hunter S. Thompson
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? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon
can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is
not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It’s a strange world. Some people get
rich and others eat shit and die.
– Hunter S. Thompson
As your attorney, it is my duty to inform you that it is not important that you understand
what I’m doing or why you’re paying me so much money. What’s important is that you
continue to do so.
– Hunter S. Thompson
A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by
circumstance.
– Hunter S. Thompson
For a loser, Vegas is the meanest town on earth.
– Hunter S. Thompson
I’ve always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it’s a bit like fucking,
which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don’t do much giggling.
– Hunter S. Thompson
When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Some people will tell you that slow is good – but I’m here to tell you that fast is better. I’ve
always believed this, in spite of the trouble it’s caused me. Being shot out of a cannon will
always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles!
– Hunter S. Thompson
Anything that gets your blood racing is probably worth doing.
– 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
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
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. I do not say lonely – at least, not all the time – but essentially, and finally, alone.
This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don’t see how you can respect
yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Some may never live, but the crazy never die.
– Hunter S. Thompson
There is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction
in terms.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain on the roof and instant coffee, to
unemployment insurance and library cards, to absinthe and good-hearted landlords, to music
and warm bodies and contraceptives… and to the “good life,” whatever it is and wherever it
happens to be.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Too weird to live, too rare to die!
– Hunter S. Thompson
The rock music business is a cruel and shallow trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves
and pimps run free, and good men lie like dogs. There is also a negative side.
– Hunter S. Thompson
I feel the same way about disco as I do about herpes.
– Hunter S. Thompson
We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those
we have entrusted to enforce those laws.
– Hunter S. Thompson
The Sixties were an era of extreme reality. I miss the smell of tear gas. I miss the fear of
getting beaten.
– Hunter S. Thompson
The highways are crowded with people who drive as if their sole purpose in getting behind
the wheel is to avenge every wrong done them by man, beast or fate. The only thing that
keeps them in line is their fear of death, jail and lawsuits.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Take it from me, there’s nothing like a job well done. Except the quiet enveloping darkness at
the bottom of a bottle of Jim Beam after a job done any way at all.
– 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, on George W. Bush
Bush is a natural-born loser with a filthy-rich daddy who pimped his son out to rich oil-
mongers. He hates music, football and sex, in no particular order, and he is no fun at all.
– Hunter S. Thompson
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.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Anything worth doing, is worth doing right.
– Hunter S. Thompson
You better take care of me Lord, if you don’t you’re gonna have me on your hands.
– Hunter S. Thompson
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.
– Hunter S. Thompson
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Bill Clinton does not inhale marijuana, right? You bet. Like I chew on LSD but I don’t swallow
it.
– 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
Writing is the flip side of sex – it’s only good when it’s over.
– Hunter S. Thompson
If I’d written 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
Freedom is something that dies unless it’s used.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Frankly, I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left
for me.
– Hunter S. Thompson
In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upwardly 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
A word to the wise is infuriating.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call
it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel. I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious
consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run
about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Weird behavior is natural in smart children, like curiosity is to a kitten.
– Hunter S. Thompson
He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time.
– Hunter S. Thompson, on Richard Nixon
Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.
– 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
If we get chased out of Iraq with our tail between our legs, that will be the fifth consecutive
Third-world country with no hint of a Navy or an Air Force to have whipped us in the past 40
years.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Journalism is a low trade and habit worse than heroin.
– Hunter S. Thompson
You’d be surprised at the things people will do in order to get their names or pictures in the
paper.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish – a product of the demented
imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live out
where the real winds blow – to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky, and drive fast on
empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested… Res ipsa
loquitur. Let the good times roll.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Crack is ruining the drug culture.
– Hunter S. Thompson
A man can live on his wits and his balls for only so long.
– Hunter S. Thompson
You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug, especially when its
waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye.
– Hunter S. Thompson
For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.
– Hunter S. Thompson
The brutal reality of politics would be probably intolerable without drugs.
– Hunter S. Thompson
No man is so foolish but he may sometimes give another good counsel, and no man so wise
that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than his own. He that is taught only
by himself has a fool for a master.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Not everybody is comfortable with the idea that politics is a guilty addiction. But it is.
– Hunter S. Thompson