Quotes from Hunter S. Thompson

Dogs fucked the Pope, no fault of mine

With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.

The daily diet is lean for the infantry.

Poor Williams was left holding the civic bag; he had taken a gutsy stand, his image was all moxie . . . and on Monday night, when the Angels were finally gone, he had earned the leisure that enabled him to go out to the lakefront and gaze off in a proud wistful way, like Gatsby, at the green neon lights of the tavern across the water, where the others were counting their money.

Freedom, Truth, Honor—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. I

The streets of every city are thronged with men who would pay all the money they could get their hands on to be transformed - even for a day - into hairy, hard-fisted brutes who walk over cops, extort free drinks from terrified bartenders and then thunder out of town on big motorcycles after raping the banker's daughter.

They don't expect to win anything, but on the other hand, they have nothing to lose.

Right," I said. "But first we need the car. And after that, the cocaine. And then the tape recorder, for special music, and some Acapulco shirts.

We were past the point of debating the wisdom of this move; it was already done, and our only hope was to get to the other side.

With apologies to Austin Ruse and the National Review, it's passages like this, not any endorsement of the drug-fueled, last-minute allnighter, that explain why Hunter Thompson will always be celebrated by young people. It had nothing to do with drugs, the F word, or being cool, and everything to do with the fact that Thompson never lost his sense of appropriate outrage, never fell into the trap of accepting that moral compromise was somehow a sign of growth and adulthood. Both

Any lawyer who says there's no such thing as rape should be hauled out to a public place by three large perverts and buggered at high noon, with all his clients watching.

Right," I said. "But first we need the car. And after that, the cocaine. And then the tape recorder, for special music, and some Acapulco

Many fine books have been written in prison.

We can't stop here. This is bat country!

The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing if Nazis had won the war. This is the Sixth Reich.

Apesar de desejar muito todas as coisas que o dinheiro compra, havia uma corrente diabólica a desviar-me para outro caminho, para a anarquia, para a pobreza e para a doidice. Tinha aquela ilusão louca de que um homem pode levar uma vida decente sem se alugar como um Judas

local reporters going out on the press-bus each day for the carefully staged "player interviews," that Dolphin tackle Manny Fernandez described as "like going to the dentist every day to have the same tooth filled

No other speaker at that convention was allowed to ignore the time limit laid out for him in the split-second script, but Goldwater was encouraged to rave and snarl at the cameras until he ran out of things to say. His speech set the tone for the whole convention, and his only real competition was Ronald Reagan. Compared to those two, both Agnew and Nixon sounded like bleeding-heart liberals.

because what I want you to tell me, Mother Roberts—and I mean this very seriously—is why have I been in Houston for eight days without anybody offering me some cocaine?

Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?

At one point in the wake of the Hell's Angels uproar a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune‡ did a long article on the motorcycle scene and decided in the course of his research that "there is something about the sight of a passing motorcyclist that tempts many automobile drivers to commit murder.

A motorcyclist has to drive as if everybody else on the road is out to kill him.

Because of the headwaiter mentality that prevails among customs officials, no commercial shipper of marijuana or anything else illegal would make the mistake of using Hell's Angels for runners. It would be like sending a car up to the border with "Opium Express" painted in red letters on both sides.

Animals don't hire lawyers