Quotes from Hunter S. Thompson

How many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote FOR something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?

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

I'm sure I must have sounded like a fool and a borderline psychotic most of that year, when I talked to people who thought they knew who and where they were at the time ... but looking back, I see that if I wasn't Right, at least I wasn't Wrong, and in that context I was forced to learn from my confusion ... which took awhile, and there's still no proof that what I finally learned was Right, but there's not a hell of a lot of evidence to show that I'm Wrong either.

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 on 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.

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.

We came out here to find the American Dream, and now that we're right in the vortex you want to quit ... You must realize that we've found the main nerve. I know, he said. That's what gives me the Fear.

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 balcony overlooking the town and the harbor; then you sat there and drank until something happened.

I wanted to take off all my clothes and never wear them again.

Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective. So it would seem foolish, would it not, to adjust our lives to the demands of a goal we see from a different angle everyday? How could we ever hope to accomplish anything anther than galloping neurosis?

I am a road man for the lords of karma.

Coming of age in a fascist police state will not be a barrel of fun for anybody, much less for people like me, who are not inclined to suffer Nazis gladly and feel only contempt for the cowardly flag-suckers who would gladly give up their outdated freedom to live for the mess of pottage they have been conned into believing will be freedom from fear.

The Angels don't like to be called losers, but they have learned to live with it. "Yeah, I guess I am," said one. "But you're looking at one loser who's going to make a hell of a scene on the way out.

Paranoia is just another mask for ignorance. The truth, when you finally chase it down is almost always far worse than your darkest visions and fears

Politics is the Art of Controlling Your Enviroment.

Whatever he might have denied me was unimportant; it was the fact that he could deny me anything at all, even what I didn't want

We'd be fools not to ride this strange torpedo all the way out to the end.

The room was very quiet. I walked over to the TV set and turned it on to a dead channel-white noise at maximum decibels, a fine sound for sleeping, a powerful continuous hiss to drown out everything strange.

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.

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

Kill the body and the head will die.

right' i said. 'but first, we need the car. and after that, the cocaine. and then the tape recorder, for special music, and some acapulco shirts.

The brutal reality of politics would be probably intolerable without drugs.

What do you want? Where's the goddamn ice I ordered? Where's the booze? There's a war on, man! People are being killed!

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..