Quotes from Hunter S. Thompson

In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.

The minute I saw it, I felt that here was the place I'd been looking for.

If I don't have a job by then—and the kind of job I want is scarce as hell—then I'll be off again. Where I'm going to get the money to go bouncing around the country like this is a real interesting problem: but I shall find it somewhere. I'll have to.

Vehicle… vehicle… vehicle—a very strange looking word, if you stare at it for eight or nine minutes… "Skulking" is another interesting-looking word. And so much for that.

No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride … and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well … maybe chalk it off to forced consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten. It's all in Kesey's Bible.… The Far Side of Reality.

I've always thought that the blue-collar vote had to be a source of his strength," said Frank Mankiewicz, McGovern's main strategist. "It always seemed to me that McGovern—not as the anti-war candidate but as the 'change' candidate—would appeal more to Middle America than he would to any other group. They're the ones with the most to gain from change and they're the ones who get screwed by the way we do business in this country.

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.

McGovern has made it painfully clear that he wants more than just the nomination; he has every intention of tearing the Democratic Party completely apart and re-building it according to his own blueprint…

But if McGovern loses in November, control of the Democratic Party will instantly revert to the Ole Boys, and McGovern himself will be labeled "another Goldwater" and stripped of any power in the party.

The Angels, like all other motorcycle outlaws, are rigidly anti-Communist. Their political views are limited to the same kind of retrograde patriotism that motivates the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. They are blind to the irony of their role . . . knight errants of a faith from which they have already been excommunicated. The Angels will be among the first to be locked up or croaked if the politicians they think they agree with ever come to power.

He showed me a pencil-written analysis of the voting trends. In most black districts, Humphrey was beating McGovern two to one. In the white labor districts, McGovern was easily taking Humphrey. The blacks were clearly the only bloc in the state that had not gone all out for

There is something about the sight of a passing motorcyclist that tempts many automobile drivers to commit murder.

Both McGovern and Wallace, he said, draw on the same pool of extremely alienated blue-collar voters, a group that is constantly getting deeper into bitterness, cynicism, and resentment about the current government.

We get treated good here [in Monterey]. Most other places we get thrown out of town. —Frenchy from Berdoo talking to a reporter not many hours before the Angels were thrown out of town

If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people -including me- would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism

But Muskie was the one who could beat Nixon or unite the party or was the clear leader—or any of those other phrases of antiquity.

leave the other stuff to Life

Yeah, right. I think I'd like to get up there at night, all alone—with a head full of mescaline, just roll around in the sky like a big Condor….

Muskie is already finished," he said then. "He had no base. Nobody's really for Muskie. They're only for the Front-Runner, the man who says he's the only one who can beat Nixon—but not even Muskie himself believes that anymore; he couldn't even win a majority of the Democratic vote in New Hampshire, on his own turf.

A natural street freak, just eating whatever came by.

I like to load up on mescaline and turn my amplifier up to 110 decibels for a taste of White Rabbit while the sun comes up on the snow-peaks along the Continental Divide. Which is not entirely the point. The world is full of places where a man can run wild on drugs and loud music and firepower -- but not for long.

There was no reason to feel pressure, but I felt it anyway -- the pressure of hot air and passing time, an idle tension that builds up in places where men sweat twenty-four hours a day.

A group photo of the top ten journalists in America on any given day would be a monument to human ugliness.

So much for objective journalism. Don't bother to look for it here—not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. 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 gross contradiction in terms.