Quotes from Hunter S. Thompson

because it is a very elegant feeling to wake up in the morning and go down to your neighborhood polling place and come away feeling proud of the way you voted.

He was just another noisy little punk in the great legion of punks who march between the banners of bigger and better men. Freedom, Truth, Honour - you could rattle off a hundred such words and behind every one of them would gather a thousand punks, pompous little farts, waving the banner with one hand and reaching under the table with the other.

As your attorney, I advise you to tell me where you put the goddamn mescaline.

So if I decide to leap for The Fountain when I finish this memo, I want to make one thing perfectly clear—I would genuinely love to make that leap, and if I don't I will always consider it a mistake and a failed opportunity, one of the very few serious mistakes of my First Life that is now ending.

I hate pain, despite my ability to tolerate it beyond all known parameters, which is not necessarily a good thing.

Who are these people? These faces! Where do they come from? They look like caricatures of used-car dealers from Dallas. But they're real. And, sweet Jesus, there are a hell of a lot of them—still screaming around these desert-city crap tables at four-thirty on a Sunday morning. Still humping the American Dream, that vision of the Big Winner somehow emerging from the last-minute pre-dawn chaos of a stale Vegas casino.

Successful con men are treated with considerable respect in the South. A good slice of the settler population of that region were men who'd been given a choice between being shipped off to the New World in leg-irons and spending the rest of their lives in English prisons.

The wide receiver had a real taste for crime, and he indulged it with an erratic kind of vigor that made him an albatross for Madden and a natural soulmate for my old friend, Al Davis, who remains the ultimate Raider. They were serious people, and John Madden was definitely one of them, for good or ill. Living with the Oakland Raiders in those days was not much different than living with the Hell's Angels. I

It was easy to understand why Sala didn't mind sharing; neither of us ever went there except to change clothes or sleep. Night after night I would sit uselessly at Al's, drinking myself into a stupor because I couldn't stand the idea of going back to the apartment.

I went back to one of the motels, went into the office, turned on the light, picked a key off the desk and located a cabin by myself. The next morning it took me 20 minutes to find somebody to pay—and then I was told I wouldn't be welcome there in the future because my car had a license plate from Louisville. They don't care much for city boys, specially when they're roamin' around late at night.

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.

With rare exceptions, the outlaw bike is a Harley 74

In the argot of the cycle world the Harley is a "hog," and the outlaw bike is a "chopped hog.

OK for now. I enjoyed my quick, high-powered visit over there and look forward to a dead-game replay when I'm in better condition. Tell Hinckle he'd better take some liver exercises...and also to get braced for my wild cards, which don't always mix well with grapefruit juice and burbon. - To Peter Collier 10/11/1967

As I came over the brink of the cliff, a few children laughed, an old hag began screeching, and the men just stared. Here was a white man with 12 Yankee dollars in his pocket and more than $ 500 worth of camera gear slung over his shoulders, hauling a typewriter, grinning, sweating, no hope of speaking the language, no place to stay—and somehow they were going to have to deal with me.

The only glaring weakness in McGovern's sweep was his failure to break Humphrey's grip on the black wards in Milwaukee—where The Hube had campaigned avidly, greeting all comers with the Revolutionary Drug Brothers handshake. It was

He often swore that if all the people who had worked for the paper in those years could appear at one time before the throne of The Almighty—if they all stood there and recited their histories and their quirks and their crimes and their deviations—there was no doubt in his mind that God himself would fall down in a swoon and tear his hair. Of course Lotterman exaggerated;

The sun woke me up the next morning. I sat up and groaned. My clothes were full of sand.

The only one of the candidates this year who has consistently ignored and broken every rule in the Traditional Politicians Handbook is George Wallace. He doesn't do plant gates and coffee klatches. Wallace is a performer, not a mingler. He campaigns like a rock star, working always on the theory that one really big crowd is better than forty small ones. But to hell with these theories.

The Oakland chapter's "bondsman" is a handsome middle-aged woman with platinum-blond hair named Dorothy Connors. She has a pine-paneled office, drives a white Cadillac and treats the Angels gently, like wayward children. "These boys are the backbone of the bail-bond business," she says. "Ordinary customers come and go, but just like clockwork, the Angels come down to my office each week to make their payments. They really pay the overhead.

Right next to me a huge reptile was gnawing on a woman's neck, the carpet was a blood-soaked sponge—impossible to walk on it, no footing at all. "Order some golf shoes," I whispered. "Otherwise, we'll never get out of this place alive. You notice these lizards don't have any trouble moving around in this muck—that's because they have claws on their feet.

Sincerity is the important thing on TV. A presidential candidate should at least seem to believe what he's saying—even if it's all stone crazy.

The ugly truth is that Wallace had never even bothered to understand the problems—much less come up with any honest solutions—but "the Fighting Little Judge" has never lost much sleep from guilt feelings about his personal credibility gap. Southern politicians are not made that way. Successful con men are treated with considerable respect in the South. A

about to quit." "Why?" He laughed. "Everybody quits—you'll quit. Nobody worth a shit can work here.