Hunter S. Thompson

“As you were, I was. As I am, you will be.”

“I think I'm going to have to get a flying license very soon, and maybe one of those Lear jets. It beats motorcycles all to hell.”

“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.”

“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.”

“If we get chased out of Iraq with our tail between our legs, that will be the fifth consecutive Third-world country with no hint of a Navy or an Air Force to have whipped us in the past 40 years.”

“Quacks are a part of our culture, and we all fall prey to them. Who among us can say, for sure, that even our own personal physicians are honest and competent?”

“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.”

“Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning.”

“There's also a down side.”

“I'll call New York for some cash.”

“There was no time for scholarly details, and, besides, I have always believed that a man can fairly be judged by the standards and taste of his choices in matters of high-level plagiarism.”

“Fiction is a bridge to the truth that journalism can't reach.”

“Every GOP administration since 1952 has let the Military-Industrial Complex loot the Treasury and plunge the nation into debt on the excuse of a wartime economic emergency.”

“Journalism is "a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world of misfits and drunkards and failures.”

“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.”

“Justice is expensive in America. There are no Free Passes... You might want to remember this, the next time you get careless and blow off a few Parking Tickets. They will come back to haunt you the next time you see a Cop car in your rear-view mirror.”

“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.”

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

“With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.”

“I think you either have to have a very strong decisive person at the top or else a really brilliant staff command.”

“[Polo Is My Life] is what's called a sex book - you know, sex, drugs and rock and roll. It's about the manager of a sex theater who's forced to leave and flee to the mountains. He falls in love and gets in even more trouble than he was in the sex theater in San Francisco. Most of my stories are tales of anguish, stress and grief.”

“As far as I'm concerned, it's a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity.”

“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.”

“By the time I got to high school I knew what I was gonna do. Mainly because I looked around and saw there wasn't much else I was able to do. I was a criminal. I was a juvenile delinquent.”

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

“My blood is too thick for California: I have never been able to properly explain myself in this climate.”

“I haven't found a drug yet that can get you anywhere near as high as a sitting at a desk writing, trying to imagine a story no matter how bizarre it is, [or] going out and getting into the weirdness of reality and doing a little time on the Proud Highway.”

“Sex, drugs, and insanity have always worked for me, but I wouldn't recommend them for everyone.”

“I am not a yachting person, by nature, but I have just enough experience on the sea under sail to feel a certain nostalgia for it when I see a big white racing yacht heeled over at cruising speed on the ocean, and I can still tie a mean bowline knot on just about anything in less than 10 seconds.”

“Of all the men that have run for president in the twentieth century, only George McGovern truly understood what a monument America could be to the human race.”

“In four short years he has turned our country from a prosperous nation at peace into a desperately indebted nation at war. But so what? He is the President of the United States, and you're not. Love it or leave it.”

“A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.”

“Avoid being seized by the police. The cops are not your friends. Don't tell them anything.”

“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.”

“Weird behavior is natural in smart children, just as curiosity is to a kitten.”

“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.”

“["Where the Buffalo Roam" is] horrible pile of crap. [Bill] Murray did a good job. But it was a bad script. You can't beat a bad script. It was just a horrible movie. A cartoon. But Bill Murray did a good job. We actually wrote and shot several different endings and beginnings and they all got cut out in the end. It was disappointing.”

“I've already become a mastodon in print - I don't see a consciousness for my kind of journalism.”

“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.”

“With the truth so dull and depressing, the only working alternative is wild bursts of madness and filigree.”

“Nixon was a crook, of course, but he was also a rabid football fan - and he knew the game, which still astounds me, but I have always had a soft spot for him because of it.”

“Smart people understand that there is no such thing as paranoia. It is just another mask for ignorance.”

“Objective journalism is one of the main reasons that American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long.”

“Few people understand the psychology of dealing with a highway traffic cop.”

“Duke is an ugly word in Kentucky. Nothing in the world compares to the joy of beating those hateful swine from Duke.”

“Nixon was a bad loser. He hated losing worse than death, and that is why I enjoyed him. We were both football fans, both addicts; and on some days, nothing else mattered.”

“At the top of the mountain we are all snow leopards.”

“No matter how much I wanted all those things that I needed money to buy, there was some devilish current pushing me off in another direction -- toward anarchy and poverty and craziness. That maddening delusion that a man can lead a decent life without hiring himself out as a Judas Goat.”

“Jack Kerouac influenced me quite a bit as a writer... in the Arab sense that the enemy of my enemy was my friend.”

“There is a progression of understanding vis-à-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 . . .”