Quotes from 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.

Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

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

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.

This wavering paradox is a pillar of the outlaw stance. A man who has blown all his options can't afford the luxury of changing his ways. He has to capitalize on whatever he has left, and he can't afford to admit-no matter how often he's reminded of it-that every day of his life takes him farther down a blind alley.

The only way to prepare for a trip like this, I felt, was to dress up like human peacocks and get crazy, then screech off across the desert and cover the story.

Some book reviewer whose name I forget recently called me a 'vicious misanthrope' . . . or maybe it was a 'cynical misanthrope'. . . but either way, he (or she) was right; and what got me this way was politics .

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?

You will be flogged for being right and flogged for being wrong, and it hurts both ways--but it doesn't hurt as much when you're right.

One of the things you learn, after years of dealing with drug people, is that everything is serious. You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug—especially when it's waving a razor-sharp hunting knife in your eyes.

There was also the fact that sending a penniless writer to get $135 worth of beer was — as Khrushchev said of Nixon — 'like sending a goat to tend the cabbage'.

How many more nights and weird mornings can this terrible shit go on? How long can the body and the brain tolerate this doom-struck craziness? This grinding of teeth, this pouring of sweat, this pounding of blood in the temples… small blue veins gone amok in front of the ears, sixty and seventy hours with no sleep.

I harbor a secret urge to whack a salesman in the face, crack his teeth and put red bumps around his eyes.

In a nervous society where a man's image is frequently more important than his reality, the only people who can afford to advertise their drug menus are those with nothing to lose.

The best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism.

It had been a bad trip ... fast and wild in some moments, slow and dirty in others, but on balance it looked like a bummer. On my way back to San Francisco, I tried to compose a fitting epitaph. I wanted something original, but there was no escaping the echo of Mistah Kurtz' final words from the heart of darkness: The horror! The horror! ... Exterminate all the brutes!

The only way to write honestly about the scene is to be part of it. If there is one quick truism about psychedelic drugs, it is that anyone who tries to write about them without first-expierience is a fool and a fraud.

There was no sense in blowing everything away for the sake of some violent ape I'd never even met.

Life just seems too huge and too fascinating for me to begin thinking about curing my restlessness at this stage of the game. Maybe later.

They claimed no allegiance to any flag and valued no currency but luck and good contacts.

And the whole Bush family, from Texas, should be boiled in poisoned oil.

Across the board... Not junkies or freaks, but people who were just as comfortable with drugs like weed, booze, or coke as we are - and we're not weird, are we? Hell no, we're just overworked professionals who need to relax now and then, have a bit of the whoop and the giggle, right?

Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits—a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.

This place is like the Army: the shark ethic prevails--eat the wounded. 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.