Top 500 Hunter S. Thompson Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

152. “I miss Nixon. Compared to these Nazis we have in the White House now, Richard Nixon was a flaming liberal.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

153. “If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

154. “The reason most people play golf is to wear clothes they would not be caught dead in otherwise.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

155. “You better take care of me Lord, if you don’t you’re gonna have me on your hands.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

156. “I’m bound to go to heaven because I’ve already served my time in hell.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

157. “Bush is a natural-born loser with a filthy-rich daddy who pimped his son out to rich oil-mongers. He hates music, football and sex, in no particular order, and he is no fun at all.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

158. “In the meantime, I would drink, rest, and ponder the meaning of this mob.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

159. “Some people will tell you that slow is good – but I’m here to tell you that fast is better.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

160. “What the hell is the sense of trying to hold the Democratic party together, if it’s really a party of expediency, something that’s put together every four years?”

— Hunter S. Thompson

161. “There might be some serious fun in politics.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

162. “I need beaches, and blackness, and moonlit nakedness.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

163. “Las Vegas is the savage heart of the American Dream.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

164. “The behavior of the crowd at Churchill Downs is like 100,000 vicious Hyenas going berserk all at once in a space about the size of a 777 jet or the White House lawn.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

165. “I sat there a long time, and thought about a lot of things. Foremost among them was the suspicion that my strange and ungovernable instincts might do me in before I had a chance to get rich. No matter how much I wanted all those things that I needed money to buy, there was some devilish current pushing me off in another direction – toward anarchy and poverty and craziness. That maddening delusion that a man can lead a decent life without hiring himself out as a Judas Goat.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

166. “They don’t hardly make ’em like him any more – but just to be on the safe side, he should be castrated anyway.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

167. “At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles – a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other – that kept me going.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

168. “As your attorney, it is my duty to inform you that it is not important that you understand what I’m doing or why you’re paying me so much money. What’s important is that you continue to do so.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

169. “My blood is too thick for California: I have never been able to properly explain myself in this climate.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

170. “The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the Sixth Reich.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

171. “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.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

172. “I am more than just a serious basketball fan. I am a life-long addict. I was addicted from birth, in fact, because I was born in Kentucky and I learned, early on, that Habitual Domination was a natural way of life.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

173. “He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

174. “I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger: A man on the move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

175. “You can’t play city rules when you live in a jungle.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

176. “If there is in fact, a heaven and a hell, all we know for sure is that hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

177. “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

178. “In a nation of frightened dullards there is a sorry shortage of outlaws, and those few who make the grade are always welcome:.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

179. “Nixon was a professional politician, and I despised everything he stood for – but if he were running for president this year against the evil Bush-Cheney gang, I would happily vote for him.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

180. “Every GOP administration since 1952 has let the Military-Industrial Complex loot the Treasury and plunge the nation into debt on the excuse of a wartime economic emergency.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

181. “The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don’t mind admitting it.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

182. “The regrets I have are so minor. You know, would I leave my Keith Richards hat, with the silver skull on it, on the stool at the coffee shop at LaGuardia? I wouldn’t do that again. But overall, no, I don’t have any regrets.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

183. “The Sixties were an era of extreme reality. I miss the smell of tear gas. I miss the fear of getting beaten.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

184. “There are many harsh lessons to be learned from the gambling experience, but the harshest one of all is the difference between having Fun and being Smart.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

185. “There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death?”

— Hunter S. Thompson

186. “And the whole Bush family, from Texas, should be boiled in poisoned oil.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

187. “I’m a word freak. I like words. I’ve always compared writing to music. That’s the way I feel about good paragraphs. When it really works, it’s like music.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

188. “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

189. “I never knew where I was going, but I ripped the tits off of everything that got in my way. By the time they figured me out, it was too late.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

190. “Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

191. “Reality itself is too twisted.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

192. “The Raiders of old were vicious and crazy and cruel. Hanging around their locker room was like hanging around the weight room at Folsom Prison.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

193. “Never fire a warning shot. It is a waste of ammunition.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

194. “Writing is the flip side of sex – it’s good only when it’s over.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

195. “This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip. He crashed around America selling “conciousness expansion” without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously. After West Point and the Priesthood, LSD must have seemed entirely logical to him... but there is not much satisfaction in knowing that he blew it very badly for himself, because he took too many others down with him.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

196. “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.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

197. “It was like a scene from the final hours of the Roman Empire: Everywhere you looked, some prominent politician was degrading himself in public.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

198. “She was wearing the same clothes, but now she looked haggard and dirty. The delicate illusions that get us through life can only stand so much strain.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

199. “I can’t think in terms of journalism without thinking in terms of political ends. Unless there’s been a reaction, there’s been no journalism. It’s cause and effect.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

200. “There is not much mental distance between a feeling of having been screwed and the ethic of total retaliation, or at least the kind of random revenge that comes with outraging the public decency.”

— Hunter S. Thompson