HSHunter S. Thompson

158 collected words

Hunter S. Thompson

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

In the Carolinas they say "hill people" are different from "flatlands people," and as a native Kentuckian with more mountain than flatlands blood, I'm inclined to agree. This was one of the theories I'd been nursing all the way from San Francisco. Unlike Porterville or Hollister, Bass Lake was a mountain community ... and if the old Appalachian pattern held, the people would be much slower to anger or panic, but absolutely without reason or mercy once the fat was in the fire. Like the Angels, they would tend to fall back in an emergency on their own native sense of justice -- which bears only a primitive resemblance to anything written in law books. I thought the mountain types would be far more tolerant of the Angels' noisy showboating, but -- compared to their flatlands cousins -- much quicker to retaliate in kind at the first evidence of physical insult or abuse.

Hunter S. Thompson / quote

02Undated

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 / quote

03Undated

The only problem with the Angels' new image was that the outlaws themselves didn't understand it. It puzzled them to be treated as symbolic heroes by people with whom they had almost nothing in common. Yet they were gaining access to a whole reservoir of women, booze, drugs and new action -- which they were eager to get their hands on, and symbolism be damned. But they could never get the hang of the role they were expected to play, and insisted on ad-libbing the lines. This fouled their channels of communication, which made them nervous ... and after a brief whirl on the hipster party circuit, all but a few decided it was both cheaper and easier, in the long run, to buy their own booze and hustle a less complicated breed of pussy.

Hunter S. Thompson / quote

04Undated

We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world—bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts.

Hunter S. Thompson / quote

05Undated

This maybe the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it—that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

Hunter S. Thompson / quote

06Undated

I am a child of the American Century, and I feel a genetic commitment to understanding why it happened, and why I take it so personally.

Hunter S. Thompson / quote

07Undated

Richard Nixon has never been one of my favorite people, anyway. For years I've regarded his very existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad.

Hunter S. Thompson / quote

08Undated

All around us were people I had spent ten years avoiding--shapeless women in wool bathing suits, dull-eyed men with hairless legs and self-conscious laughs, all Americans, all fearsomely alike. These people should be kept at home, I thought; lock them in the basement of some goddamn Elks Club and keep them pacified with erotic movies; if they want a vacation, show them a foreign art film; and if they still aren't satisfied, send them into the wilderness and run them with vicious dogs.

Hunter S. Thompson / quote

09Undated

We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world—a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us. . . . No redeeming social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or we’ll kill you.Well, shit on that dumbness. George W. Bush does not speak for me or my son or my mother or my friends or the people I respect in this world. We didn’t vote for these cheap, greedy little killers who speak for America today—and we will not vote for them again in 2002. Or 2004. Or ever.Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush?They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us—they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis.And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them.

Hunter S. Thompson / quote

10Undated

The person who doesn't scatter the morning dew will not comb grey hairs

Hunter S. Thompson / quote

11Undated

The point is valid: the difference between survival and wipe-out in a physical crisis is nearly always a matter of conditioned reflexes.

Hunter S. Thompson / quote

12Undated

The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage & whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy—then go back to the office & sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece.

Hunter S. Thompson / quote

13Undated

Just the other day the AP wire had a story about a man from Arkansas who entered some kind of contest and won a two-week vacation--all expenses paid--wherever he wanted to go. Any place in the world: Mongolia, Easter Island, the Turkish Riviera . . . but his choice was Salt Lake City, and that's where he went. Is this man a registered voter? Has he come to grips with the issues? Has he bathed in the blood of the lamb?

Hunter S. Thompson / quote

14Undated

A totally befuddled voter may look at a Vote for McGovern sign and do just that.

Hunter S. Thompson / quote

15Undated

It was necessary, we felt, to thoroughly terrify our opponents, so that even in hollow victory, they would learn to fear every sunrise ...

Hunter S. Thompson / quote

16Undated

From the very beginning Ihad felt a definite contact with Yeamon, a kind of tenuous understanding that talk is cheap in this league and that a man who knew what he was after had damn little time to find it, much less to sit back and explain himself.

Hunter S. Thompson / quote

17Undated

Journalism, to me, is just another drug – a free ride to scenes I'd probably miss if I stayed straight. But I'm neither a chemist nor an editor; all I do is take the pill or the assignment and see what happens. Now and then I get a bad trip, but experience has made me more careful about what I buy... so if you have a good pill I'm open; I'll try almost anything that hasn't bitten me in the past.

Hunter S. Thompson / quote

18Undated

It never got weird enough for me.

Hunter S. Thompson / quote

19Undated

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 / quote

20Undated

But I knew it was pure masturbation, because down in my gut I wanted nothing more than a clean bed and a bright room and something solid to call my own at least until I got tired of it. There was an awful suspicion in my mind that I'd finally gone over the hump, and the worst thing about it was that I didn't feel tragic at all, but only weary, and sort of comfortably detatched.

Hunter S. Thompson / quote

21Undated

Every time I think of Tim Leary I get angry. He was a liar and a quack and a worse human being than Richard Nixon. For the last twenty-six years of his life he worked as an informant for the FBI and turned his friends into the police and betrayed the peace symbol he hid behind.

Hunter S. Thompson / quote

22Undated

Oral Roberts is a greed-crazed white-trash lunatic who should have been hung upside down from a telephone pole on the outskirts of Tulsa 44 years ago, before he somehow transmogrified into the money-sucking animal that he became when he discovered television.

Hunter S. Thompson / quote

23Undated

I had come to regard him as a loner with no real past and a future so vague that there was no sense talking about it.

Hunter S. Thompson / quote

24Undated

As I said, to put our faith in tangible goals would seem to be, at best, unwise. So we do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. We strive to be ourselves. But don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean that we can’t be firemen, bankers, or doctors — but that we must make the goal conform to the individual, rather than make the individual conform to the goal...In short, he has not dedicated his life to reaching a pre-defined goal, but he has rather chosen a way of life he knows he will enjoy. The goal is absolutely secondary: it is the functioning toward the goal which is important.

Hunter S. Thompson / quote