Top 500 Hunter S. Thompson Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “There is something about the sight of a passing motorcyclist that tempts many automobile drivers to commit murder.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

452. “The importance of Liking Yourself is a notion that fell heavily out of favor during the coptic, anti-ego frenzy of the Acid Era – but nobody guessed back then that the experiment might churn up this kind of hangover: a whole subculture of frightened illiterates with no faith in anything.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

453. “Don’t worry, boys, we’ll weather this storm of approval and come out as hated as ever – Saul Alinsky to his staff shortly before his death, June 1972.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

454. “I can’t recommend the food at that place, because they wouldn’t let me eat.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

455. “666 Pennsylvania Ave. “Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.” – Revelation 13:18.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

456. “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.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

457. “But the main reason I’m working for him,” he said, “is that he’s the only guy we have who can beat Nixon.” He stabbed the arm again. “If Nixon wins again, we’re in real trouble.” He picked up his drink, then saw it was empty and put it down again. “That’s the real issue this time,” he said. “Beating Nixon. It’s hard to even guess how much damage those bastards will do if they get in for another four years.”1.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

458. “This is the horror of American politics today – not that Richard Nixon and his fixers have been crippled, convicted, indicted, disgraced and even jailed – but that the only available alternatives are not much better; the same dim collection of burned-out hacks who have been fouling our air with their gibberish for the last twenty years.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

459. “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;.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

460. “A natural street freak, just eating whatever came by.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

461. “Our vibrations were getting nasty. But why? Was there no communication in this car? Had we deteriorated to the level of dumb beasts?”

— Hunter S. Thompson

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

— Hunter S. Thompson

463. “I know,” I said. “I’m a Triple Scorpio.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

464. “Kill?′ I realized I could never properly explain that word to this creature toiling here in its garden. Had it ever eaten meat? Could it conjugate the verb ’hunt?”

— Hunter S. Thompson

465. “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.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

466. “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.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

467. “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.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

468. “The room looked like the site of some disastrous zoological experiment involving whiskey and gorillas.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

469. “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.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

470. “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.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

471. “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.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

472. “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.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

473. “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.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

474. “Before San Francisco he had been in Germany, teaching English and cultivating an oriental-type beard. On his way out to the coast he stopped in New York and picked up a mistress with a new Ford. It was de rigueur, in those days, to avoid marriage at all costs. He came to me through the recommendation of a friend then working in Europe for a British newspaper. “Willard is a great man,” said the letter. “He is an artist and a man of taste.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

475. “Many fine books have been written in prison.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

476. “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.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

477. “The point is valid: the difference between survival and wipe-out in a physical crisis is nearly always a matter of conditioned reflexes.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

478. “The Air Force has never valued a sense of humor in its career men, and in high-risk fields like flight testing, a sense of the absurd will cripple a man’s future just as surely as an LSD habit.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

479. “Hallucinations are bad enough. But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

480. “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.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

481. “Getting barred from the White House is like being blackballed at the Playboy Club. There are definite advantages to having your name on the Ugly List in places like that.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

482. “Listen, madam,” he snapped. “I’m damn near intolerably handsome down here where I am. You’d go crazy if I stood up!”

— Hunter S. Thompson

483. “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.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

484. “He definitely had a feel for words, almost like an idiot-savant.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

485. “Psychedelics are almost irrelevant in a town where you can wander into a casino any time of the day or night and witness the crucifixion of a gorilla – on a flaming neon cross that suddenly turns into a pinwheel, spinning the beast around in wild circles above the crowded gambling action.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

486. “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.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

487. “Some of the outlaws understand this communications gap, but most are puzzled and insulted to hear that “normal people” consider them horrible.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

488. “Few girls look with favor on a man of my stripe, a brutalizer of old people.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

489. “The difference between the student radicals and the Hell’s Angels is that the students are rebelling against the past, while the Angels are fighting the future.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

490. “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.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

491. “What election?” he asked. “Never mind,” I said. “I was only kidding.” One.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

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

— Hunter S. Thompson

493. “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.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

494. “I got a lady who liked George because she said he knew how to tie his tie right,” said the black girl. “Gloria Steinem showed him how to tie it. You should have seen how he tied it before that.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

495. “The daily diet is lean for the infantry.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

496. “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.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

497. “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 pompous contradiction in terms.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

498. “It is a straight shot from Cancun to Havana, sixty-six minutes by jet plane across the Gulf of Mexico with a Soviet-blonde stewardess serving free rum and synthetic ham and cheese sandwiches.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

499. “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.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

500. “We had several narrow escapes: at one point I tried to drive the Great Red Shark into the laundry room of the Landmark Hotel – but the door was too narrow, and the people inside seemed dangerously excited.”

— Hunter S. Thompson