Quotes from Hunter S. Thompson

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.

Love plans for tomorrow and loneliness thinks of yesterday.

Then there was organ music, a sort of feverish dirge, and then I was stepping out of my shorts and into the shower with Chenault. I remember the feel of those soapy little hands washing my back, keeping my eyes tightly shut while my soul fought a hopeless battle with my groin, then giving up like a drowning man and soaking the bed with our bodies.

Fear? I know not fear. There are only moments of confusion.

Turn up the radio. Turn up the tape machine. Look into the sunset up ahead. Roll the windows down for a better taste of the cool desert wind. Ah yes. This is what it's all about. Total control now. Tooling along the main drag on a Saturday night in Las Vegas, two good old boys in a fireapple-red convertible … stoned, ripped, twisted … Good People.

The root assumption here is that neither party would nominate a man more than 20 percent different from the type of person most Americans consider basically right and acceptable. Which almost always happens. There is no potentially serious candidate in either major party this year who couldn't pass for the executive vice-president for mortgage loans in any hometown bank from Bangor to San Diego. We

Lucy paints portraits of Barbara Streisand.

You cheap honky faggots," he snarled. "Which one of you wants to get cut?

Humphrey will go into a black neighborhood in Milwaukee and drench the streets with tears while deploring "the enduring tragedy" that life in Nixon's America has visited on "these beautiful little children"—and then act hurt and dismayed when a reporter who covered his Florida campaign reminds him that "In Miami you were talking just a shade to the Left of George Wallace and somewhere to the Right of Mussolini." Hubert

Every now and then you have to get away from that ugly Old Politics trip, or it will drive you to kicking the walls and hurling AR3's into the fireplace.

I'm not trying to send you out "on the road" in search of Valhalla, but merely pointing out that it is not necessary to accept the choices handed down to you by life as you know it. There is more to it than that — no one HAS to do something he doesn't want to do for the rest of his life.

A man has to BE something; he has to matter.

a nervous society where a man's image is frequently more important than his reality

There was only one road back to L.A. - U.S. Interstate 15. Just a flat-out high speed burn through Baker and Barstow and Berdoo. Then onto the Hollywood Freeway, and straight on into frantic oblivion. Safety. Obscurity.

The hoofbeats rang through the town like pistol shots.

It is Autumn, as you know, and things are beginning to die. It is so wonderful to be out in the crisp Fall air, with the leaves turning gold and the grass turning brown and the warmth going out of the sunlight and big hot fires in the fireplace while Buddy rakes the lawn. We see a lot of bombs on TV because we watch it a lot more, now that the days get shorter and shorter, and darkness comes so soon, and all the flowers die from freezing.

It was dangerous lunacy, but it was also the kind of thing a real connoisseur of edge-work could make an argument for.

Nixon stabbed his Enemies in the back, but Clinton did it to his Friends. His lust to inflict Punishment surpassed even Nixon's, and he put more people in prison than Caligula. He had his own brother locked up & he refused to pardon his old friend Webb Hubbell.… Richard Nixon was a criminally insane Monster; Bill Clinton is a black-hearted Swine of a friend.

Real happiness, in politics, is a wide-open hammer shot on some poor bastard who knows he's been trapped, but can't flee.

I have explained many times that I am, by Profession, a Gambler -- not some jock-sniffing nerd or a hired human squawk-box with the brain of a one-cell animal. No. That would be your average career sportswriter -- and, more specifically, a full-time Baseball writer.

The prevailing quality of life in America -- by any accepted methods of measuring -- was unarguably freer and more politically open under Nixon than it is today in this evil year of Our Lord 2002.

For an instant it was very peaceful Ã¢â'¬Â¦ and then it was like being shot off the road by a bazooka, but with no noise. Neither a deer on a hillside nor a man on a battlefield ever hears the shot that kills him, and a man going over the high side on a motorcycle hears the same kind of high-speed silence.

A week earlier I'd been locked into the idea that the Redskins would win easily -- but when Nixon came out for them and George Allen began televising his prayer meetings I decided that any team with both God and Nixon on their side was fucked from start.

He chuckled. "All I can see is that goddamn necklace. Being seen with you could jeopardize my career. Do you have anything illegal in that bag?" "Never," I said. "A man can't travel around on airplanes wearing a Condor Legion neck-piece unless he's totally clean. I'm not even armed … This whole situation makes me feel nervous and weird and thirsty." I lifted my sunglasses to look for the bar, but the light was too harsh.