Hunter S. Thompson Quotes

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

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.

I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.

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

Freedom is something that dies unless it's used.

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.

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.

Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas ... with the music at top volume and at least a pint of ether.

You better take care of me Lord, if you don't you're gonna have me on your hands.

For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.

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.

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

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

Anything that gets your blood racing is probably worth doing.

A word to the wise is infuriating.

Morality is temporary, wisdom is permanent.

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

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.

You won't find reasonable men on the tops of tall mountains.

Never turn your back on fear. It should always be in front of you, like a thing that might have to be killed.

Coming of age in a fascist police state will not be a barrel of fun for anybody, much less for people like me, who are not inclined to suffer Nazis gladly and feel only contempt for the cowardly flag-suckers who would gladly give up their outdated freedom to live for the mess of pottage they have been conned into believing will be freedom from fear.

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 person who doesn't scatter the morning dew will not comb gray hairs.

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.

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.

Call on God, but row away from the rocks.

A cap of good acid costs five dollars and for that you can hear the Universal Symphony with God singing solo and Holy Ghost on drums.

Politics is the art of controlling your environment.

Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole life-style a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect.

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.

Publishers are notoriously slothful about numbers, unless they're attached to dollar signs - unlike journalists, quarterbacks, and felony criminal defendants who tend to be keenly aware of numbers at all times.

I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me.

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.

There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge.

There is a progression of understanding vis-a-vis pro football that varies drastically with the factor of distance — physical, emotional, intellectual and every other way. Which is exactly the way it should be, in the eyes of the amazingly small number of people who own and control the game, because it is this finely managed distance factor that accounts for the high-profit mystique that blew the sacred institution of baseball off its ''national pastime'' pedestal in less than fifteen years.

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.