Top 518 Quotes & Sayings by Hunter S. Thompson

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American journalist Hunter S. Thompson.
Last updated on October 10, 2024.
Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter Stockton Thompson was an American journalist and author who founded the gonzo journalism movement. He rose to prominence with the publication of Hell's Angels (1967), a book for which he spent a year living and riding with the Hells Angels motorcycle gang to write a first-hand account of their lives and experiences.

March is a month without mercy for rabid basketball fans. There is no such thing as a 'gentleman gambler' when the Big Dance rolls around. All sheep will be fleeced, all fools will be punished severely... There are no Rules when the deal goes down in the final weeks of March. Even your good friends will turn into monsters.
Politics is the art of controlling your environment.
There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge. — © Hunter S. Thompson
There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge.
I believe the Republicans have never thought that democracy was anything but a tribal myth.
Football fans share a universal language that cuts across many cultures and many personality types. A serious football fan is never alone. We are legion, and football is often the only thing we have in common.
There is no such thing as paranoia. Your worst fears can come true at any moment.
I have never believed much in luck, and my sense of humor has tended to walk on the dark side.
Luck is a very thin wire between survival and disaster, and not many people can keep their balance on it.
The Raiders of old were vicious and crazy and cruel. Hanging around their locker room was like hanging around the weight room at Folsom Prison.
The Hell's Angels try not to do anything halfway, and anyone who deals in extremes is bound to cause trouble, whether he means to or not. This, along with a belief in total retaliation for any offense or insult, is what makes the Hell's Angels unmanageable for the police and morbidly fascinating to the general public.
I think I'm one of the most patriotic people that I've ever encountered in America. I consider myself a bedrock patriot. I participate very actively in local politics, because my voice might be worthwhile. I participate in a meaningful way - not by donations; I work at it.
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.
The world is still a weird place, despite my efforts to make clear and perfect sense of it. — © Hunter S. Thompson
The world is still a weird place, despite my efforts to make clear and perfect sense of it.
Without gambling, I would not exist.
Yes sir, I am a tortured man for all seasons, as they say, and I have powerful friends in high places. Birds sing where I walk, and children smile when they see me coming.
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.
A word to the wise is infuriating.
Duke is an ugly word in Kentucky. Nothing in the world compares to the joy of beating those hateful swine from Duke.
I hate pain, despite my ability to tolerate it beyond all known parameters, which is not necessarily a good thing.
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.
The only difference between the sane and the insane is that the sane have the power to lock up the insane.
I just usually go with my own taste. If I like something, and it happens to be against the law, well, then I might have a problem.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.
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.
For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.
Buy the ticket, take the ride.
You better take care of me Lord, if you don't you're gonna have me on your hands.
Yesterday's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why.
If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up.
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.
I learned a long time ago that reality was much weirder than anyone's imagination.
As long as I'm learning something, I figure I'm OK - it's a decent day.
'Crazy' is a term of art; 'Insane' is a term of law. Remember that, and you will save yourself a lot of trouble.
It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.
The person who doesn't scatter the morning dew will not comb gray hairs.
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.
Objective journalism is one of the main reasons that American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long.
February is always a bad month for TV sports. Football is gone, basketball is plodding along in the annual midseason doldrums, and baseball is not even mentioned. — © Hunter S. Thompson
February is always a bad month for TV sports. Football is gone, basketball is plodding along in the annual midseason doldrums, and baseball is not even mentioned.
Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning.
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.
The next MVP of the Super Bowl is just as likely to have been a full-time grocery store bagger last year as a Heisman Trophy winner.
Victory is a fleeting thing in the gambling business. Today's winners are tomorrow's blinking toads, dumb beasts with no hope.
All the blood is drained out of democracy - it dies - when only half the population votes.
The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.
Freedom is something that dies unless it's used.
I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.
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.
Truth is weirder than any fiction I've seen. — © Hunter S. Thompson
Truth is weirder than any fiction I've seen.
Paranoia is just another word for ignorance.
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.
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.
Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole life-style a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect.
If Sunday is the Lord's day, then Saturday belongs to the Devil. It is the only night of the week when he gives out Free passes to the Late show at the Too Much Fun Club.
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.
As far as I'm concerned, it's a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity.
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
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 was an evil man - evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency.
Some may never live, but the crazy never die.
Not everybody is comfortable with the idea that politics is a guilty addiction. But it is.
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