Hunter S. Thompson Quotes

“There are always risks in challenging excessive police power, but the risks of not challenging it are more dangerous, even fatal.”

“Democracy as a system has evolved into something that Thomas Jefferson didn't anticipate.”

“Morality is temporary, wisdom is permanent.”

“I don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.”

“Beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life.”

“It was the kind of town that made you feel like Humphrey Bogart: you came in on a bumpy little plane, and, for some mysterious reason, got a private room with a balcony overlooking the town and the harbor; then you sat there and drank until something happened.”

“But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing.”

“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!”

“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.”

“I got tired and embarrassed by the constant poverty of those years. I told Doug [ Brinkley] this is really going to be a horrible downer of a book [The Proud Highway] if all it's going to be is about being broke. I didn't like being reminded of desperation at all times.”

“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.”

“She was wearing the same clothes, but now she looked haggard and dirty. The delicate illusions that get us through life can only stand so much strain.”

“Bill Clinton does not inhale marijuana, right? You bet. Like I chew on LSD but I don't swallow it.'”

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

“Anything worth doing is worth doing well.”

“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.”

“I think George Washington owned guns. I've never seen any contradiction with that.”

“The importance of Liking Yourself is a notion that fell heavily out of favor 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“We can't stop here, this is bat country!”

“All the blood is drained out of democracy - it dies - when only half the population votes.”

“I would feel real trapped in this life if I didn't know I could commit suicide at any time.”

“Get out of control, but appear under control. It?s not bad to alarm other people, though ? it?s good for them.”

“Politics is the art of controlling your environment.”