Quotes from Hunter S. Thompson

It was almost May. I knew that New York was getting warm now, that London was wet, that Rome was hot -- and I was on Vieques, where it was always hot and where New York and London and Rome were just names on a map.

Their only common ground is their disdain for the present, or the status quo.

A good reporter, if he chooses the right approach, can understand a cat or an Arab. The choice is the problem, and if he chooses wrong he will

I am a generous man, by nature, and far more trusting than I should be. Indeed. The real world is risky territory for people with generosity of spirit. Beware.

Live steady. Don't fuck around. Give anything weird a wide berth - including people. It's not worth it. I learned this the hard way, through brutal overindulgence.

This is old politicians, says Joel Swerdlow, the twenty-six-year-old who ran McGovern's operation in the North half of Milwaukee. We have precinct captains, ward leaders, car captains, the whole bit. That's the only way you win. But instead of patronage bosses and sewer commissioners, we've got young people who work because they're interested in the issues.

you can get a lot higher without drugs than with them.

Maybe the who secret of turning a crowd on is getting turned on yourself by the crowd

Once they let you get away with running around for ten years like a king hoodlum, you tend to forget now and then that about half the people you meet live from one day to the next in a state of such fear and uncertainty that about half the time they honestly doubt their own sanity.

There was also socio-psychic factor. 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. Just roll the roof back and screw it on, grease the face with white tanning butter and move out with the music at top volume, and at least a pint of ether.

Why bother with newspapers, if this is all they offer? Agnew was right. The press is a gang of cruel faggots. 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.

I still suffer hate and pain in my heart every time I see the word Duke on a TV screen, and that rotten Thing happened nine years ago when that Swine Christian Laettner hit that impossible last-second shot against Kentucky. I still have a Memory Block about it -- but as I recall it was in the East Regional final that is still known as the Best basketball game ever played. Geez, it Was and remains the Worst Shock I've experienced in my Life.

The Edge Ã¢â'¬Â¦ There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others—the living—are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still Out there.

It had been a bad trip Ã¢â'¬Â¦ fast and wild in some moments, slow and dirty in others, but on balance it looked like a bummer.

not some romantic leftover, but the first wave of a future that nothing in our history has prepared

I am not a Criminal, by trade, but over the years I have developed a distinctly criminal nervous system. Some people might call it paranoia, but I have lived long enough to know that there is no such thing as paranoia. Not in the 21st Century. No. Paranoia is just another word for ignorance.

This is a reassuring viewpoint and it would be even more so if the police shared it. Unfortunately, they don't. Cops who know the Angels only from press accounts are sometimes afraid of them, but familiarity seems to breed contempt, and cops who know the Angels from experience usually dismiss

Being arrested in any airport is bad, but being arrested in the Miami airport is terrifying.

Look over there," I said. "Two women fucking a polar bear." "Please," he said. "Don't tell me those things. Not now.

When this war goes into the history books, the United States Air Force will rank as the most efficient gang of murderers in the history of man.

I want those doors open and that war closed

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era- the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be apart of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.

In a town full of bedrock crazies, nobody even notices an acid freak.

them as an overrated threat. On the other hand, at least 90 percent of the dozens of cops I talked to all over California were seriously worried about what they referred to as "the rising tide of lawlessness," or "the dangerous trend toward lack of respect for law and order." To them the Hell's Angels are only a symptom of a much more threatening thing Ã¢â'¬Â¦ the Rising Tide.