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| "On my tombstone they will carve, "IT NEVER GOT FAST ENOUGH FOR ME." |
| -Hunter S. Thompson Quotes |
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| "The highways are crowded with people who drive as if their sole purpose in getting behind the wheel is to avenge every wrong done them by man, beast or fate. The only thing that keeps them in line is their fear of death, jail and lawsuits." |
-Hunter S. Thompson (Quotes from Hells Angels) |
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| "As things stand now, I am going to be a writer. I'm not sure that I'm going to be a good one or even a self-supporting one, but until the dark thumb of fate presses me to the dust and says 'you are nothing', I will be a writer." |
| -Hunter S. Thompson ( Quotes from Gonzo ) |
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| "I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling." |
| -Hunter S. Thompson Quotes |
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| "If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up." |
| -Hunter S. Thompson Quotes |
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| "It was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool full of mermaids." |
| -Hunter S. Thompson Quotes |
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| "A word to the wise is infuriating. " |
| -Hunter S. Thompson Quotes |
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| "The greatest mania of all is passion: and I am a natural slave to passion: the balance between my brain and my soul and my body is as wild and delicate as the skin of a Ming vase." |
-Hunter S. Thompson ( Quotes from The Curse of Lono
) |
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| "Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era&the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . . |
-Hunter S. Thompson ( Quotes from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
) |
|
| 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. |
| -Hunter S. Thompson ( Quotes from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ) |
|
| My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights&or very early mornings&when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . . |
| -Hunter S. Thompson ( Quotes from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ) |
|
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle&that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting&on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark&that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back." |
| -Hunter S. Thompson ( Quotes from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ) |
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| "For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled." |
| -Hunter S. Thompson Quotes |
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| "We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws." |
| -Hunter S. Thompson Quotes |
|
"We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or where will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for war seem to know who did it or where to look for them.
This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed--for anyone, and certainly not for a baffled little creep like George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it off." |
| -Hunter S. Thompson Quotes |
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| "No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun & for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax & This won't hurt" |
| -Hunter S. Thompson Quotes |
|
| "Like most others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going." |
-Hunter S. Thompson ( Quotes The Rum Diary
) |
|
| "I feel the same way about disco as I do about herpes." |
| -Hunter S. Thompson ( Quotes from Speech given to the University of Colorado Student Union (1977-11-01) ) |
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| "Maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish&a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live out where the real winds blow&to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested . . . Res ipsa loquitur. Let the good times roll." |
| -Hunter S. Thompson Quotes |
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| "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 Quotes |
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| "Freedom is something that dies unless it's used." |
| -Hunter S. Thompson Quotes |
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"We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.
Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can." |
| -Hunter S. Thompson ( Quotes from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ) |
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| "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 Quotes |
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| "A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance." |
| -Hunter S. Thompson Quotes |
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| "It was obvious that he was a man who marched through life to the rhythms of some drum I would never hear." |
| -Hunter S. Thompson ( Quotes from Hells Angels ) |
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| "Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas ... with the music at top volume and at least a pint of ether." |
| -Hunter S. Thompson ( Quotes from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ) |
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| "I was not proud of what I had learned but I never doubted that it was worth knowing." |
| -Hunter S. Thompson ( Quotes from The Rum Diary ) |
|
"All my life, my heart has sought a thing I cannot name.
Remembered line from a long-
forgotten poem" |
| -Hunter S. Thompson ( Quotes from Hells Angels ) |
|
| "There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die." |
-Hunter S. Thompson ( Quotes from Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80's
) |
|
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| "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 Quotes |
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| "I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours." |
| -Hunter S. Thompson Quotes |
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| "Sex without love is as hollow and ridiculous as love without sex." |
| -Hunter S. Thompson Quotes |
|
| "Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel. I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio." |
| -Hunter S. Thompson Quotes |
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| "Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously." |
| -Hunter S. Thompson Quotes |
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| "It never got weird enough for me." |
| -Hunter S. Thompson Quotes |
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| "We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and -- in spite of True Romance magazines -- we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely -- at least, not all the time -- but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness." |
-Hunter S. Thompson ( The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967 (The Fear and Loathing Letters, Vol. 1)
) |
|
| "Some may never live, but the crazy never die." |
| -Hunter S. Thompson Quotes |
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| "When the going gets weird the weird turn professional." |
| -Hunter S. Thompson Quotes |
|
| "We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and -- in spite of True Romance magazines -- we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely -- at least, not all the time -- but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness." |
| -Hunter S. Thompson ( Quotes from The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967 (The Fear and Loathing Letters, Vol. 1) ) |
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| "So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?" |
| -Hunter S. Thompson Quotes |
|
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| "Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!" |
| -Hunter S. Thompson Quotes |
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| "No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well...maybe chalk it off to forced conscious expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten." |
| -Hunter S. Thompson Quotes |
|
| "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me." |
| -Hunter S. Thompson Quotes |
|
| "The hippies, who had never really believed they were the wave of the future anyway, saw the election results as brutal confirmation of the futility of fighting the establishment on its own terms. There had to be a whole new scene, they said, and the only way to do it was to make the big move & either figuratively or literally & from Berkeley to the Haight-Ashbury, from pragmatism to mysticism, from politics to dope... The thrust is no longer for "change" or "progress" or "revolution," but merely to escape, to live on the far perimeter of a world that might have been. " |
| -Hunter S. Thompson Quotes |
|
| "Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of 'the rat race' is not yet final." |
-Hunter S. Thompson ( Quotes from Great Shark Hunt (Gonzo Papers, Vol. 1) )
|
|
| "In a nation run 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." |
| -Hunter S. Thompson ( Quotes from Great Shark Hunt (Gonzo Papers, Vol. 1) ) |
|
| "I returned to the Holiday Inn & where they have a swimming pool and air-conditioned rooms & to consider the paradox of a nation that has given so much to those who preach the glories of rugged individualism from the security of countless corporate sinecures, and so little to that diminishing band of yesterday's refugees who still practice it, day by day, in a tough, rootless and sometimes witless style that most of us have long since been weaned away from. " |
| -Hunter S. Thompson ( Quotes from Great Shark Hunt (Gonzo Papers, Vol. 1) ) |
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| "Who knows? 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 & a clean well lighted place full of sunshine and bromides and fast cars where almost everybody seems vaguely happy, except those who know in their hearts what is missing... And being driven slowly and quietly into the kind of terminal craziness that comes with finally understanding that the one thing you want is not there. Missing. Back-ordered. No tengo. Vaya con dios. Grow up! Small is better. Take what you can get... " |
| -Hunter S. Thompson (Quotes from Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80's
) |
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| " It is all well and good for children and acid freaks to still believe in Santa Claus & but it is still a profoundly morbid day for us working professionals. It is unsettling to know that one out of every twenty people you meet on Xmas will be dead this time next year... Some people can accept this, and some can't. That is why God made whiskey, and also why Wild Turkey comes in $300 shaped canisters during most of the Christmas season." |
| -Hunter S. Thompson ( Quotes from "Fear and Loathing in Elko" Rolling Stone ) |
|
| " There is a huge body of evidence to support the notion that me and the police were put on this earth to do extremely different things and never to mingle professionally with each other, except at official functions, when we all wear ties and drink heavily and whoop it up like the natural, good-humored wild boys that we know in our hearts that we are..These occasions are rare, but they happen & despite the forked tongue of fate that has put us forever on different paths... " |
| -Hunter S. Thompson Quotes |
|
"Suddenly I was tired of Lotterman;He was a phony and he didn't even know it. He was forever yapping about freedom of the press and keeping the paper going, but if he'd had a million dollars and all the freedom in the world he'd still put out a worthless newspaper because he wasn't smart enough to put out a good one. He was just another noisy little punk in the great legion of punks who marched between the banners of bigger and better men. Freedom, Truth, Honour- you could rattle off a hundred such words and behind every one of them would gather a thousand punks, pompous little farts, waving the banner with one hand and reaching under the table with the other.
I stood up. "Ed," I said using his name for the first time, "I believe I'll quit." " |
| -Hunter S. Thompson ( Quotes from The Rum Diary ) |
|
| The city's frightening now. That's the basis of my reaction to Las Vegas. It's not the city I wrote about. It's not the same place at all. You'll notice that even the - what do you call them? - milestone or trademark casinos are now gone. |
| -Hunter S. Thompson ( Quotes from "30 years after FALILV: Hunter S. Thompson on Las Vegas Today'" Las Vegas City Life (2002-06-07) ) |
|
| Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist, you have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it. |
| -Hunter S. Thompson Quotes |
|
| First, there's a huge difference between being arrested and being guilty. Second, see, the law changes and I don't. How I stand vis-à-vis the law at any given moment depends on the law. The law can change from state to state, from nation to nation, from city to city. I guess I have to go by a higher law. How's that? Yeah, I consider myself a road man for the lords of karma." |
| -Hunter S. Thompson ( Quotes from Salon Interview ) |
|
| 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. |
| -Hunter S. Thompson ( Quotes from Prisoner of Denver, Vanity Fair ) |
|
| The hard core, the outlaw elite, were the Hell's Angels... wearing the winged death's-head on the back of their sleeveless jackets and packing their "mamas" behind them on big "chopped hogs." They rode with a fine unwashed arrogance, secure in their reputation as the rottenest motorcycle gang in the whole history of Christendom. |
| -Hunter S. Thompson ( Quotes from Hells Angels ) |
|
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| "The streets of every city in America are filled with men who would pay all the money they could lay their hands on to be transformed, even for a day, into hairy, hard-fisted brutes who walk all over cops, extort drinks from terrified bartenders and roar out of town on big motorcycles after raping the banker's daughter. " |
| -Hunter S. Thompson ( Quotes from Hells Angels ) |
|
| "Anything that gets the adrenalin moving like a 440 volt blast in a copper bathtub is good for the reflexes and keeps the veins free of cholesterol... but too many adrenaline rushes in any given time span has the same effect on the nervous system as too many electro-shock treatments are said to have on the brain: after a while you start burning out the circuits. When a jackrabbit gets addicted to road-running, its only a matter of time before he gets smashed & and when a journalist turns into a politics junkie he will sooner or later start raving and babbling in print about things that only a person who has Been There can possibly understand. " |
| -Hunter S. Thompson Quotes |
|
| " We've come to a point where every four years this national fever rises up & this hunger for the Saviour, the White Knight, the Man on Horseback & and whoever wins becomes so immensely powerful, like Nixon is now, that when you vote for President today you're talking about giving a man dictatorial power for four years. I think it might be better to have the President sort of like the King of England & or the Queen & and have the real business of the presidency conducted by... a City Manager-type, a Prime Minister, somebody who's directly answerable to Congress, rather than a person who moves all his friends into the White House and does whatever he wants for four years. The whole framework of the presidency is getting out of hand. It's come to the point where you almost can't run unless you can cause people to salivate and whip each other with big sticks. You almost have to be a rock star to get the kind of fever you need to survive in American politics. " |
| -Hunter S. Thompson Quotes |
|
| "The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now & with somebody & and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives. " |
| -Hunter S. Thompson Quotes |
|
| " We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear & fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts, or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer. " |
| -Hunter S. Thompson Quotes |
|
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