Source: Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century
Hunter S. Thompson: Thing
Hunter S. Thompson was American journalist and author. Explore interesting quotes on thing.
Hunter S. Thompson:
536
quotes
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1990s, He Was A Crook (1994)
Context: These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern — but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.
Source: Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga
1990s, The Rum Diary (1998)
“All my life, my heart has sought a thing I cannot name.
Remembered line from a long-
forgotten poem”
Source: Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga
1960s, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1966)
Context: My face looked like it had been jammed into the spokes of a speeding Harley, and the only thing keeping me awake was the spastic pain of a broken rib. It had been a bad trip... fast and wild in some moments, slow and dirty in others, but on balance it looked like a bummer. On my way back to San Francisco, I tried to compose a fitting epitaph. I wanted something original, but there was no escaping the echo of Mistah Kurtz' final words from the heart of darkness: "The horror! The horror!... Exterminate all the brutes!"
“I sat there for a long time, and thought about a lot of things.”
1990s, The Rum Diary (1998)
Context: I sat there for a long time, and thought about a lot of things. Foremost among them was the suspicion that my strange and ungovernable instincts might do me in before I had a chance to get rich. No matter how much I wanted those things that I needed money to buy, there was some devilish current pushing me off in another direction — toward anarchy, poverty and craziness. That maddening delusion that a man can lead a decent life without hiring himself out as a Judas goat.
Letter to Larry Callen (30 October 1957), p. 71
1990s, The Proud Highway : The Fear and Loathing Letters Volume I (1997)
Context: They say that "he who flies highest, falls farthest" — and who am I to argue? But we can't forget that "he who doesn't flap his wings, never flies at all". And with that, I'll stop trying to convince myself that I can't fail; how dull the whole thing would be if that were true.
“The whole thing sucks. It was wrong from the start, and it is getting wronger by the hour.”
"Love in a Time of War" (31 March 2003)
2000s
Context: It is hard to ignore the prima facie dumbness that got us bogged down in this nasty war in the first place. This is not going to be like Daddy's War, old sport. He actually won, and he still got run out of the White House nine months later... The whole thing sucks. It was wrong from the start, and it is getting wronger by the hour.
Comments on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (1979), p. 109
1970s
Context: The only other important thing to be said about Fear & Loathing at this time is that it was fun to write, and that's rare — for me, at least, because I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking — which is fun only for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling. Nothing is fun when you have to do it — over and over, again and again — or else you'll be evicted, and that gets old. So it's a rare goddamn trip for a locked-in, rent-paying writer to get into a gig that, even in retrospect, was a kinghell, highlife fuck-all from start to finish... and then to actually get paid for writing this kind of manic gibberish seems genuinely weird; like getting paid for kicking Agnew in the balls. So maybe there's hope. Or maybe I'm going mad... In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upward mobile — and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: Not necessarily to Win, but mainly to keep from Losing Completely... The Swine are gearing down for a serious workout this time around... So much, then, for The Road — and for the last possibilities of running amok in Las Vegas... Well, at least, I'll know I was there, neck deep in the madness, before the deal went down, and I got so high and wild that I felt like a two-ton Manta ray jumping all the way across the Bay of Bengal.
Better than Sex (22 August 1994)
1990s
Context: No candidate will risk being linked with a "suspected" addict — but a registered, admitted addict is a whole different thing. As long as I'd confessed, I was okay. Nobody really cared about the countless criminal addictions that preyed on me day and night — just as long as I was not in denial. That was the key. As long as they knew that I knew I was sick and guilty, I was safe.
“The TV business is uglier than most things.”
Originally published in the San Francisco Examiner (4 November 1985), this is often quoted as concluding with the statement "There's also a negative side." Research by David Emery, in Your Guide to Urban Legends http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/dubiousquotes/a/hunter_thompson_2.htm indicates that these words, however were not included by Thompson himself in the published version.
1980s, Generation of Swine (1988)
Context: 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.
Source: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
“I knew a Buddhist once, and I've hated myself ever since. The whole thing was a failure.”
2000s, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century (2004)
Source: Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century