Top 518 Quotes & Sayings by Hunter S. Thompson - Page 2

There might be some serious fun in politics.

Rude people will now & then ask me why I think I know so much about Politics. I tell them it's because I'm Smart... But that is a lie: The real reason is because I'm an incurable Gambling addict.

There is no fool like a careless gambler who starts taking victory for granted.

There is always room for losers in the football business. They are the mother's milk of gambling, and why not? Somebody has to do it, or there won't be any winners.

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.

One of the most basic factors in sports is that winning becomes a habit, and losing is the same way. When failure starts to feel normal in your life or your work or even your darkest vices, you won't have to go looking for trouble, because trouble will find you. Count on it.

The writer must be a participant in the scene... like a film director who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work, and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least the main character.

Justice is expensive in America. There are no Free Passes... You might want to remember this, the next time you get careless and blow off a few Parking Tickets. They will come back to haunt you the next time you see a Cop car in your rear-view mirror.

I have long understood that losing always comes with the territory when you wander into the gambling business, just as getting crippled for life is an acceptable risk in the linebacker business. They both are extremely violent sports, and pain is part of the bargain. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

I have warned many times about the guaranteed dangers of betting with your heart instead of your head - big darkness, soon come - but every once in a while you get a fair chance to have it both ways, and the annual NCAA basketball Tournament is one of them.

I have always loved blizzards, if only because of the driving experience - which is definitely an acquired taste.

Quacks are a part of our culture, and we all fall prey to them. Who among us can say, for sure, that even our own personal physicians are honest and competent?

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

I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it.

Remember this, folks - I am a Hillbilly, and I don't always Bet the same way I talk. Good advice is one thing, but smart gambling is quite another.

I am more than just a serious basketball fan. I am a life-long addict. I was addicted from birth, in fact, because I was born in Kentucky and I learned, early on, that Habitual Domination was a natural way of life.

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.

Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairytale artist.

The trouble with Nixon is that he's a serious politics junkie. He's totally hooked and like any other junkie, he's a bummer to have around, especially as President.

Richard Nixon was a criminally insane Monster - Bill Clinton is a black-hearted Swine of a friend.

I am a professional sportswriter, among other things, and I take the games seriously. It is only one of my many powerful addictions, and I don't mind admitting any of them.

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.

I had a soft-spot in my heart for Ronald Reagan, if only because he was a sportswriter in his youth.

By any accepted standard, I have had more than nine lives. I counted them up once, and there were 13 times I almost and maybe should have died.

By disgracing and degrading the presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.

Democracy as a system has evolved into something that Thomas Jefferson didn't anticipate.

I am an Addictive Personality, they say, a natural slave to passion - and many Doctors have warned me against it. I am a High-risk Patient.

Rush Limbaugh is a lame professional swine, and he makes a good living at it. He is like a hired geek in some traveling backwoods carnival - the freaks who bite the heads off chickens - but Limbaugh is a modernized geek who thinks he can bite the heads off of people.

Gambling can turn into a dangerous two-way street when you least expect it. Weird things happen suddenly, and your life can go all to pieces.

Nixon was no more a saint than he was a great president.

I have always hated bowling, and I don't mind admitting it.

All gamblers lose regularly, but they rarely discuss it in public. Losing is bad for the image, dude. Nobody buys Hot Tips from Losers. Remember that.

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.

One thing I have learned in my painful career as a gambler is that bragging when you get lucky and win a few games will plunge you into gloom and unacceptable beatings very soon. It happens every time.

Nixon represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character almost every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise.

Nixon was a bad loser. He hated losing worse than death, and that is why I enjoyed him. We were both football fans, both addicts; and on some days, nothing else mattered.

The only thing wrong with the NBA - or any other professional sport, for that matter - is a wild epidemic of Dumbness and overweening Greed. There is no Mystery about it, and no need to change any rules.

The behavior of the crowd at Churchill Downs is like 100,000 vicious Hyenas going berserk all at once in a space about the size of a 777 jet or the White House lawn.

Of all the men that have run for president in the twentieth century, only George McGovern truly understood what a monument America could be to the human race.

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.

Nixon was a crook, of course, but he was also a rabid football fan - and he knew the game, which still astounds me, but I have always had a soft spot for him because of it.

In my heart, I am always a Raider.

I don't think that my kind of journalism has ever been universally popular. It's lonely out here.

That was always the difference between Muhammad Ali and the rest of us. He came, he saw, and if he didn't entirely conquer - he came as close as anybody we are likely to see in the lifetime of this doomed generation.

I guess that's one of the things about growing up in the fifties - it never occurred to me that you wouldn't be at least as successful as your parents.

I was 22 when JFK was murdered, and I will never recover from it... Never.

I've already become a mastodon in print - I don't see a consciousness for my kind of journalism.

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.

The downward spiral of Dumbness in America is about to hit a new low.

Sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind but falling in love and not getting arrested.

Anybody who thinks that 'it doesn't matter who's President' has never been Drafted and sent off to fight and die in a vicious, stupid war on the other side of the world-or been beaten and gassed by Police for trespassing on public property-or been hounded by the IRS for purely political reasons-or locked up in the Cook County Jail with a broken nose and no phone access and twelve perverts wanting to stomp your ass in the shower. That is when it matters who is President or Governor or Police Chief. That is when you will wish you had voted.

Human beings are the only creatures on earth that claim a God and the only thing that behaves like it hasn't got one.

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.

Hope rises and dreams flicker and die. Love plans for tomorrow and loneliness thinks of yesterday. Life is beautiful and living is pain.

We are living in dangerously weird times now. Smart people just shrug and admit they're dazed and confused. The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic.

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

The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage & whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy - then go back to the office & sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece. Probably the rarest form of life in American politics is the man who can turn on a crowd & still keep his head straight - assuming it was straight in the first place.

Insanity is a legal term. Crazy is an art form.

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 don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.