Quotes from Hunter S. Thompson

The Hell's Angels as a group are often willfully stupid, but they are not without savoir-faire, and their predilection for travelling in packs is a long way from being all showbiz. Nor is it entirely due to warps and defects in their collective personality.

At the Tourist Bureau they talk about the cooling trade winds that caress the shores of Puerto Rico every day and night of the year—but Nelson Otto was a man the trade winds never seemed to touch.

The motorcycle is obviously a sexual symbol. It's what's called a phallic locomotor symbol. It's an extension of one's body, a power between one's legs. -Dr. Bernard Diamond, University of California criminologist, 1965

The bulk of the crowd looked like professors and their wives from Amherst. One of the problems, according to a bushy young radical-talking non-student from Boston, was that you had to pay a "registration fee" of two dollars before you got a vote.

That's where Time magazine lives … way out there on the puzzled, masturbating edge, peering through the keyhole and selling what they see to the big wide world of Chamber of Commerce voyeurs who support the public prints.

Jesus, you know I was walking back to the huddle and I looked over and, god damn, I almost flipped when I saw you and Davis standing together on the sideline. I thought, man, the world really is changing when you see a thing like that—Hunter Thompson and Al Davis—Christ, you know that's the first time I ever saw anybody with Davis during practice; the bastard's always alone out there, just pacing back and forth like a goddamn beast. …

Betting against the point spread is a relatively mechanical trip, but betting against another individual can be very complex, if you're serious about it—because you want to know, for starters, whether you're betting against a fool or a wizard, or maybe against somebody who's just playing the fool.

What depressed me, I think, was that McGovern was the only alternative available this time around, and I was sorry I couldn't get up for it. I agreed with everything he said, but I wished he would say a lot more—or maybe something different. Ideas? Specifics? Programs? Etc.? Well

if that Watergate case ever gets into court, he might get very nervous.

I can't recommend the food at that place, because they wouldn't let me eat.

stupid lie, regardless of who writes it or tries to justify it, is still a stupid lie Ã¢â'¬Â¦ even when it's wrapped up in flowers.

Some asshole wrote a poem about that once. It's probably good advice, if you have shit for brains.

of those days when everything's in vain … a stone bummer from start to finish; and if you know what's good for you, on days like these you sort of hunker down in a safe corner and watch.

Nearly everyone who has ridden a bike for any length of time will agree. The highways are crowded with people who drive as if their sole purpose in getting behind the wheel is to avenge every wrong ever done them by man, beast or fate.

Justice is not cheap in this country, and people who insist on it are usually either desperate or possessed by some private determination bordering on monomania

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.

Among the hardest hit was Terry the Tramp, who immediately loaded up on LSD and spent the next twelve hours locked in the back of a panel truck, shrieking and crying under the gaze of some god he had almost forgotten, but who came down that night to the level of the treetops "and just stared—man, he just looked at me, and I tell you I was scared like a little kid.

It has been a failure of such monumental proportions that political apathy is no longer considered fashnionable or even safe, among millions of people who only two years ago thought that anybody who disagreed openly with the goverment was either paranoid or subversive. Political candidates in 1974, at least, are going to have to deal with an angry, disillusioned electorate that is not likely to settle for flag-waving and pompous bullshit.

I don't really care if people think we're bad," said another. "I think this is what really keeps us going. We fight society and society fights us. It doesn't bother me.

I haven't found a drug yet that can get you anywhere near as high as sitting at a desk writing.

Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas. To relax, as it were, in the womb of the desert sun.

How long, oh Lord, how long? And how much longer will we have to wait before some high-powered shark with a fistful of answers will finally bring us face-to-face with the ugly question that is already so close to the surface in this country, that sooner or later even politicians will have to cope with it?

Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard

Look what happened the last time a Republican president tried to fix a doomed national economy. Remember Herbert Hoover?