Top 518 Quotes & Sayings by Hunter S. Thompson - Page 5

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.

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

Because the writer must be a participant in the scene, while he's writing it — or at least taping it, or even sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a main character.

It never got weird enough for me.

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.

The mind & body must be subjected to extreme stimulus, by means of drugs & music.

Good people drink good beer.

The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America (is that it) has its roots in the clubby/cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between politicians and journalists.

I am a road man for the lords of karma.

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.

Who said anything about slicing you up? ... I just wanted to carve a little Z on your forehead-- nothing serious.

Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

I didn't know Johnny Depp could act until he played me.

I wanted to take off all my clothes and never wear them again.

we left about midnight and walked down the hill in silence. the night was muggy, and all around me i felt the same pressure, a sense of time rushing by while it seemed to be standing still. whenever i thought of time in puerto rico, i was reminded of those old magnetic clocks that hung on the walls of my classrooms in high school. every now and then a hand would not move for several minutes -- and if i watched it long enough, wondering if it had finally broken down, the sudden click of the hand jumping three for four notches would startle me when it came.

Goddammit. Yeah, I have. First, there's a huge difference between being arrested and being guilty. Second, see, the law changes and I don't. How I stand vis-à-vis the law at any given moment depends on the law. The law can change from state to state, from nation to nation, from city to city. I guess I have to go by a higher law. How's that? Yeah, I consider myself a road man for the lords of karma.

Houston is a cruel, crazy town on a filthy river in East Texas with no zoning laws and a culture of sex, money and violence. It's a shabby, sprawling metropolis ruled by brazen women, crooked cops and super-rich pansexual cowboys who live by the code of the West -- which can mean just about anything you need it to mean, in a pinch.

All advice can only be a product of the man who gives it.

The first impression is always the right one. I rarely change my mind upward about people.

These things happen. One day you run everything, and the next day you run like a dog.

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive...." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas.

Some people will tell you that slow is good - but I'm here to tell you that fast is better.

You can't hoard fun. It has no shelf life.

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

If you can't make yourself understood by your friends, you'll be in trouble when your enemies come for you.

Fear is just another word for ignorance.

Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective. So it would seem foolish, would it not, to adjust our lives to the demands of a goal we see from a different angle everyday? How could we ever hope to accomplish anything anther than galloping neurosis?

The possibility of physical and mental collapse is very real now... but collapse is out of the question; as a solution or even a cheap alternative, it is unacceptable. No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind.

And the whole Bush family, from Texas, should be boiled in poisoned oil.

You'd be surprised at the things people will do in order to get their names or pictures in the paper.

Have an objective to give your bender a theme. For instance, stalking and killing a wild pig with a bowie knife.

No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.

Timothy Leary and I kept the same hours. He believed, as I do, that “After midnight, all things are possible.

We are all wired into a survival trip, now.

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

In the meantime, I would drink, rest, and ponder the meaning of this mob.

George McGovern, for all his mistakes... understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon.

Ignore that nightmare in the bathroom. Just another ugly refugee from the Love Generation, some doom-struck gimp who couldn't handle the pressure. My attorney has never been able to accept the notion - often espoused by reformed drug abusers and especially popular among those on probation - that you can get a lot higher without drugs than with them. And neither have I, for that matter.

Ah, lives there a man with soul so dead, who never to himself hath said As he hunched and rolled in his comfortable bed: To hell with the rent . . . I'll drink instead!

Like most of the others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser.

You can’t play city rules when you live in a jungle.

Revenge is one of the few things in politics that never gets lost in the mail or written off for a dime on the dollar like losers' campaign debts or pledges to help the Poor.

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.

In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upward mobile.

Women are terrified of being raped, but somewhere in the back of the womb there is one rebellious nerve end that tingles with curiosity whenever the word is mentioned.

The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now & with somebody & and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.

The car suddenly veered off the road and we came to a sliding halt in the gravel. I was hurled against the dashboard. My attorney was slumped over the wheel. “What’s wrong?” I yelled. “We can’t stop here. This is bat country!

The regrets I have are so minor. You know, would I leave my Keith Richards hat, with the silver skull on it, on the stool at the coffee shop at LaGuardia? I wouldn't do that again. But overall, no, I don't have any regrets.

Turn the goddam music up! My heart feels like an alligator!

I'm a relatively respectable citizen. Multiple felon perhaps, but certainly not dangerous.

There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. It makes you behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel. Total loss of all basic motor skills, blurred vision, no balance, numb tongue - the mind recoils in horror, unable to communicate with the spinal column. Which is interesting, because you can actually watch yourself behaving in this terrible way, but you can’t control it.

All golfers fear the one-iron. It has no angle, no loft. The one-iron is a confidence-crusher, a fear trip, an almost guarantee of shame, failure, dumbness and humiliation if you ever use it in public.

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.

One of the advantages of being dead, I guess, is that somebody else can edit all this.

Jesus! Did I SAY that? Or just think it? Was I talking? Did they hear me? I glanced over at my attorney, but he seemed oblivious.

[Richard M. Nixon 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.

It was wonderful, a stunning happy ending to what began as another tragic rock & roll story, as if Bob Dylan had been arrested in Miami for jacking off in a seedy little XXX theater while stroking the spine of a fat young boy.

I was not proud of what I had learned but I never doubted that it was worth knowing.

Paranoia is just another mask for ignorance. The truth, when you finally chase it down is almost always far worse than your darkest visions and fears

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.