Hunter S. Thompson Quotes (1937-2005)

“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.”

“Sympathy? Not for me. No mercy for a criminal freak in Las Vegas. This place is like the army: the shark ethic prevails-eat the wounded. 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.”

“If there is, in fact, a Heaven and a Hell, all we know for sure is that Hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix...”

“There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.”

“There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.”

“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 ghastly thump of a body knocked and down to the sidewalk.”

“The slow-rising central horror of "Watergate" is not that it might grind down to the reluctant impeachment of a vengeful thug of a president whose entire political career has been a monument to the same kind of cheap shots and treachery he finally got nailed for, but that we might somehow fail to learn something from it.”

“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 really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.”

“One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.”

“Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man--evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him--except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.”

“And Joyce was a poor sick fucker who probably died with his balls somewhere up around his navel. None of that for me, thanks.”

“Certainly I've read The Subterranean: all his crap for that matter. The man is an ass, a mystic boob with intellectual myopia.”

“" You know Colson had that sign on the wall in his office saying ONCE YOU HAVE THEM BY THE BALLS, THEIR HEARTS AND MINDS WILL FOLLOW.", a quote by Teddy Roosevelt”

“The concept of Ronald Reagan as a master Mole for the Aryan Nation has not taken hold yet, in the centers of political power. Even his closest people still see him as a profoundly talented old man from Hollywood who will go down in history as perhaps the greatest salesman of his time.... But not as a philosopher-king or a serious political think, like all of those other presidents that he frequently quotes. They view him more or less as they would view Willie Loman if he had wandered through the looking glass and became president of the United States.”

“We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled the Sixties. Uppers are going out of style. This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously. After West Point and the Priesthood, LSD must have seemed entirely logical to him … but there is not much satisfaction in knowing that he blew it very badly for himself, because he took too many others down with him. Not that they didn't deserve it: No doubt they all Got What Was Coming To Them. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole lifestyle that he helped to create … a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody—or at least some force—is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.”

“"I don't deny his lifestyle, because his lifestyle was pretty extreme," Anita Thompson told The Associated Press, but that lifestyle was made possible by his success as a reporter and writer, not the other way around. In her new book, The Gonzo Way: A Celebration of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, Thompson says her husband built his career with a tireless dedication to the craft of reporting, a keen awareness of his own shortcomings and his personal blend of patriotism: loving his country while mistrusting authority. … Her book, published by Fulcrum Publishing, depicts the man who used the pseudonym Raoul Duke in his famous Fear and Loathing as a relentless researcher and a voracious reader. He viewed politics as both worthy and necessary to get things done, the book says, and he believed nothing could be accomplished without friends and allies. "The Hunter I want people to understand is hardworking, righteous and a patriot — a bedrock patriot and loyal to his country and loyal to his friends," Anita Thompson said. Even his most savage political commentary was written in hopes of inspiring change: "He believed we were better than what we were electing." Thompson also knew his faults and either compensated for them or harnessed them, his widow said. He thought he was lazy, so he worked hard. He could be angry and violent, so he poured that energy onto the page.”

“Hunter was wearing a medallion, almost like an Al Sharpton medallion. He didn’t talk a lot at dinner, but when I got up from the table to leave, he hugged me so hard the medallion pressed into me and really hurt. Then he gave me the Dunhills and stared at me intensely. I knew he was going to die . . . There was only one cigarette in the pack, and I still have it today. Obviously I’d never smoke it.”

“No one took the voice of the journalist further away from ‘neutral background’ (or seemed less able to stop himself doing it) than Hunter S. Thompson. Even at the start of his career, he was no believer in journalistic neutrality. … Certainly Thompson is a peculiarly misshapen sort of moralist, one who often makes himself ugly to expose the ugliness he sees around him. Sometimes he's just ugly for the sake of it. This means that at times in The Proud Highway he comes over as an out-and-out asshole, whining about money, boring people about his unpublished novels, making a drunken fool of himself and generally using the facilities and not cleaning up afterwards.”

“Hunter was an enigma all his life. He puzzled his mother, who wondered why he did the things he did. But she understood that her eldest son had magnetism. After he became famous, she was saying his charisma was there all along, although he was difficult from the moment of his birth. Life as Hunter Thompson's mother was no weenie roast. He was a pain in the ass. He was fearless. He was cruel, but also capable of great kindness. He was a loyal friend. Near the end, he was frequently sentimental. Sometimes brusque and rude, he could also be a courtly southern gentleman. Virginia Thompson had worked overtime to raise sons with good manners.”

“A lightning rod for controversy, his antics were often portrayed by lesser men as mere self-aggrandizement, but they served a much grander purpose. He elevated an ideal, a towering lighthouse with a brilliant guiding flame for those who decided, like himself and his predecessors, to live their lives to the absolute fullest, consequences be damned. There was always a powerful comfort in knowing he was out there somewhere in the night, roaring drunk, guzzling high-octane whiskey and railing against a world amok with complacency and hypocrisy. There was always a weird sense that he could pop up any where at any time to stick it to The Man and set things straight. Sometimes he appeared a force of nature, other times a Homeric hero capable of conjuring excitement and purpose from the most innocuous of circumstances. Hunter didn’t have to seek out adventure, he was adventure. Which often meant dancing with death. Most men spend their entire lives avoiding that jig, but the good Doctor sought it out, he seemed to possess a keen understanding of the song’s deadly rhythm and he boogied down with the fucker.”