Hunter S. Thompson Quotes

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“The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who see it coming and jump aside.”

“There may be flies on you and me, but there are no flies on Jesus.”

“All we have to do is get out and vote, while it's still legal, and we will wash those crooked warmongers out of the White House.”

“Politics is the Art of Controlling Your Enviroment.”

“Kill the body and the head will die.”

“How long can we maintain? I wonder. How long before one of us starts raving and jabbering at this boy? What will he think then? This same lonely desert was the last known home of the Manson family. Will he make that grim connection..”

“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.”

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

“He gave my hand a final shake. “Okay, Kemp,” he said with a grin. “Thanks a lot – you came through like a champ.” “Hell,” I said, starting the engine. “We’re all champs when we’re drunk.”

“God's mercy on you degenerate swine.”

“Don't judge your taco by its price”

“We have bigger things to brood on and enormous reasons for wallowing in terminal craziness until we finally hit bottom.”

“The room was very quiet. I walked over to the TV set and turned it on to a dead channel-white noise at maximum decibels, a fine sound for sleeping, a powerful continuous hiss to drown out everything strange.”

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

“He wandered into the Newsroom and asked for a job the same way he’d walk into a barbershop and ask for a haircut, and with no more idea of being turned down.”

“Paranoia is just another word for ignorance.”

“Writing is the flip side of sex - it's only good when it's over.”

“Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba….”

“There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.”

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

“We'd be fools not to ride this strange torpedo all the way out to the end.”

“rain is acid…
sex is death….”

“Old God sure was in a good mood when he made this place.”

“Which is not really a hell of a lot to ask, Lord, because the final incredible truth is that I am not guilty. All I did was take your gibberish seriously… and you see where it got me? My primitive Christian instincts have made me a criminal.”

“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!”

“I had come to regard him as a loner with no real past and a future so vague there was no sense talking about it.”

“I like this place” he said with a grin “I like to sit up here and look down at the beach and think of all the good things I could do with a Luger.”

“If I had a Luger, I thought, I could drill the bastards. I leaned on one elbow and pointed a finger at the window, seeing what kind of shot I would get. Perfect. There was just enough light in the street for a good silhouette. I knew it would happen quickly, I’d have no choice: just pull the trigger and go deaf from the terrible noise, a frenzy of screaming and scratching followed by a ghastly thump of a body knocked back and down to the sidewalk.”

“I was also drunk, crazy and heavily armed at all times. People trembled and cursed when I came into a public room and started screaming in German.”

“I had a truly horrible dream last night … [Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mike Tyson and I] were on our way to a TV studio for a debate about his long-time working friendship with the powerful Bush family from Texas and how it might affect the next Bush presidency when The Terminator seizes power in Sacramento and tries to hand over the state's 54 electoral votes by election day in 2004. That is the basic plan behind Schwarzenegger running. He doesn't want to be Governor, he just wants the electoral votes to go to Bush this time.”

“Jesus man! You don't look for acid! Acid finds you when it thinks you're ready.”

“I may sound a little black, but I'm really pretty well adjusted.”

“Today, the Panzer-like Bush machine controls all three branches of our federal government, the first time that has happened since Calvin Coolidge was in the White House. And that makes it just about impossible to mount any kind of Congressional investigation of a firmly-entrenched president like George Bush. The time has come to get deeply into football. It is the only thing we have left that ain't fixed.”

“The importance of Liking Yourself is a notion that fell heavily out of favour during the coptic, anti-ego frenzy of the acid era — but nobody guessed back then that the experiment might churn up this kind of hangover; a whole subculture of frightened illiterates with no faith in anything.”

“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.”

“But wow! This goofy child president we have on our hands now. He is demonstrably a fool and a failure, and this is only the summer of '03. By the summer of 2004, he might not even be living in the White House. Gone, gone, like the snows of yesteryear.”

“Ah, fortune and fame shall follow me…and I shall dwell in the world of the chosen for a few moments of fleeting ecstasy; ere the seven burly lads turn into creditors and hustle me off to debtors' prison at last.”

“Something new is wanted. A new novel, perhaps. Something the ten-percenters don't have their hooks into yet. Those soul-fuckers should all be killed.”

“The ugly fallout from the American Dream has been coming down on us at a pretty consistent rate since Sitting Bull's time — and the only real difference now, with Election Day '72 only a few weeks away, is that we seem to be on the verge of ratifying the fallout and forgetting the Dream itself.”

“A man has to BE something; he has to matter.”

“Any lawyer who says there's no such thing as rape should be hauled out to a public place by three large perverts and buggered at high noon, with all of his clients watching.”

“The utter collapse of this Profoundly criminal Bush conspiracy will come none too soon for people like me… The massive plundering of the U. S. Treasury and all its resources has been almost on a scale that is criminally insane, and has literally destroyed the lives of millions of American people and American families. Exactly. You and me, sport — we are the ones who are going to suffer, and suffer massively. This is going to be just like the Book of Revelation said it was going to be — the end of the world as we knew it.”

“When I went into the clinic last April 30, George Bush was about 50 points ahead of his closest Democratic opponent in next year's Presidential Election. When I finally escaped from the horrible place, less than three weeks later, Bush's job-approval ratings had been cut in half — and even down into single digits, in some states — and the Republican Party was panicked and on the run. It was a staggering reversal in a very short time, even shorter than it took for his equally crooked father to drop from 93 percent approval, down to as low as 43 percent and even 41 percent in the last doomed days of the first doomed Bush Administration. After that, he was Bill Clinton's punching bag.”

“It ain't much, but it's the only weapon we have against the Greedheads.”

“Disgusting as he usually was, on rare occasions he showed flashes of stagnant intelligence. But his brain was so rotted with drink and dissolute living that whenever he put it to work it behaved like an old engine that had gone haywire from being dipped in lard.”

“The Rumsfeld-Cheney axis has self-destructed right in front of our eyes, along with the once-proud Perle-Wolfowitz bund that is turning to wax. They somehow managed to blow it all, like a gang of kids on a looting spree, between January and July, or even less. It is genuinely incredible. The U. S. Treasury is empty, we are losing that stupid, fraudulent chickencrap War in Iraq, and every country in the world except a handful of Corrupt Brits despises us. We are losers, and that is the one unforgiveable sin in America.”

“There is a huge body of evidence to support the notion that me and the police were put on this earth to do extremely different things and never to mingle professionally with each other, except at official functions, when we all wear ties and drink heavily and whoop it up like the natural, good-humored wild boys that we know in our hearts that we are. … These occasions are rare, but they happen — despite the forked tongue of fate that has put us forever on different paths…”

“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.”

“Sacrificing good men to journalism is like sending William Faulkner to work for Time magazine.”