Quotes by Hunter S. Thompson


It is not necessary to accept the choices handed down to you by life as you know it.
– Hunter S. Thompson
A word to the wise is infuriating.
– Hunter S. Thompson
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.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Call on God, but row away from the rocks.
– Hunter S. Thompson
I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Publishers are notoriously slothful about numbers, unless they're attached to dollar signs - unlike journalists, quarterbacks, and felony criminal defendants who tend to be keenly aware of numbers at all times.
– Hunter S. Thompson
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.
– Hunter S. Thompson
The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.
– Hunter S. Thompson
The person who doesn't scatter the morning dew will not comb gray hairs.
– Hunter S. Thompson
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.
– Hunter S. Thompson
There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge.
– Hunter S. Thompson
You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug, especially when its waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye.
– Hunter S. Thompson
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
– Hunter S. Thompson
The trouble with Nixon is that he's a serious politics junkie. He's totally hooked and like any other junkie, he's a bummer to have around, especially as President.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Politics is the art of controlling your environment.
– Hunter S. Thompson
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.
– Hunter S. Thompson
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.
– Hunter S. Thompson
It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.
– Hunter S. Thompson
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.
– Hunter S. Thompson
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.
– Hunter S. Thompson
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.
– Hunter S. Thompson
For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.
– Hunter S. Thompson