Top 500 Hunter S. Thompson Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “I haven’t found a drug yet that can get you anywhere near as high as sitting at a desk writing.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

203. “Of all the men that have run for president in the twentieth century, only George McGovern truly understood what a monument America could be to the human race.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

204. “Who are these people? These faces! Where do they come from? 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 screaming around these desert-city crap tables at four-thirty on a Sunday morning. Still humping the American Dream, that vision of the Big Winner somehow emerging from the last-minute pre-dawn chaos of a stale Vegas casino.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

205. “I didn’t know Johnny Depp could act until he played me.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

206. “I have always loved marijuana. It has been a source of joy and comfort to me for many years. And I still think of it as a basic staple of life, along with beer and ice and grapefruits – and millions of Americans agree with me.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

207. “Fear? I know not fear. There are only moments of confusion.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

208. “The mind of America is seized by a fatal dry rot – and it’s only a question of time before all that the mind controls will run amuck in a frenzy of stupid, impotent fear.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

209. “There’s no point in getting into politics at all unless you plan to lash things around.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

210. “He had come so far from himself that I don’t think he knew who he was anymore.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

211. “Without gambling, I would not exist.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

212. “No man is so foolish but he may sometimes give another good counsel, and no man so wise that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than his own. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

213. “It was dangerous lunacy, but it was also the kind of thing a real connoisseur of edge-work could make an argument for.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

214. “The Jews don’t beleive in Jesus! Why should I?! WHOOOEEEE!!”

— Hunter S. Thompson

215. “The line between madness and masochism was already hazy;.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

216. “Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of ‘the rat race’ is not yet final.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

217. “How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?”

— Hunter S. Thompson

218. “A man never stoops so low as when he rises to the challenge of politics.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

219. “In a nervous society where a man’s image is frequently more important than his reality, the only people who can afford to advertise their drug menus are those with nothing to lose.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

220. “Words are such a poor medium when you really want someone to feel something.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

221. “Take it from me, there’s nothing like a job well done. Except the quiet enveloping darkness at the bottom of a bottle of Jim Beam after a job done any way at all.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

222. “He wandered into the Newsroom and asked for a job the same way he’d walk into a barbershop and ask for a haircut, and with no more idea of being turned down.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

223. “Don’t have sex in the lobby – it’s usually awkward.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

224. “Platitudes are safe, because they’re easy to wink at, but truth is something else again.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

225. “But instead of losing quietly, one by one, they have banded together with a mindless kind of loyalty and moved outside the framework, for good or ill. They may not have an answer, but at least they are still on their feet.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

226. “There is probably some long-standing “rule” among writers, journalists, and other word-mongers that says: “When you start stealing from your own work you’re in bad trouble.” And it may be true.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

227. “Quacks are a part of our culture, and we all fall prey to them. Who among us can say, for sure, that even our own personal physicians are honest and competent?”

— Hunter S. Thompson

228. “No, we are getting ahead of our story, and only an jackass would do that.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

229. “The whole framework of the presidency is getting out of hand. It’s come to the point where you almost can’t run unless you can cause people to salivate and whip on each other with big sticks. You almost have to be a rock star to get the kind of fever you need to survive in American politics.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

230. “There’s also a down side.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

231. “Hey, honkies!” my attorney screamed. “Goddamnit, I’m serious! I want to sell you some pure fuckin’ smack!”

— Hunter S. Thompson

232. “Fiction is based on reality unless you’re a fairytale artist.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

233. “When Nixon went into New Hampshire, he was viewed by the pros as just another of these stubborn, right-wing waterheads with nothing better to do.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

234. “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. – John Milton, Paradise Lost.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

235. “I was thinking; my mind was running at top speed, scanning and sorting my options. They ranged all the way from Dumb and Dangerous to Crazy, Evil, and utterly wrong from the start.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

236. “What do you want? Where’s the goddamn ice I ordered? Where’s the booze? There’s a war on, man! People are being killed!”

— Hunter S. Thompson

237. “Familiarity seems to breed contempt.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

238. “We have bigger things to brood on and enormous reasons for wallowing in terminal craziness until we finally hit bottom.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

239. “If we start electing presidents on the basis of their sexual purity, some real monsters will get into the White House.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

240. “In some circles, the Mint 400 is a far, far better thing than the Superbowl, the Kentucky Derby, and the lower Oakland roller derby finals all rolled into one. This race attracts a very special breed.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

241. “It’s in my interest, in ours perhaps, or maybe the interests of the greater good, for me to smoke a joint, and calm down.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

242. “Never create anything, it will be misinterpreted, it will chain you and follow you for the rest of your life.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

243. “He had that rare weird electricity about him – that extremely wild and heavy presence that you only see in a person who has abandoned all hope of ever behaving normally.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

244. “It is entirely conceivable – given the known effects of Ibogaine – that Muskie’s brain was almost paralyzed by hallucinations at the time; that he looked out at that crowd and saw gila monsters instead of people, and that his mind snapped completely when he felt something large and apparently vicious clawing at his legs. We.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

245. “Humphrey will go into a black neighborhood in Milwaukee and drench the streets with tears while deploring “the enduring tragedy” that life in Nixon’s America has visited on “these beautiful little children” – and then act hurt and dismayed when a reporter who covered his Florida campaign reminds him that “In Miami you were talking just a shade to the Left of George Wallace and somewhere to the Right of Mussolini.” Hubert.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

246. “There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

247. “Richard Nixon looks like a flaming liberal today, compared to a golem like George Bush. Indeed. Where is Richard Nixon now that we finally need him?”

— Hunter S. Thompson

248. “It was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool full of mermaids.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

249. “How long, oh Lord, how long? And how much longer will we have to wait before some high-powered shark with a fistful of answers will finally bring us face-to-face with the ugly question that is already so close to the surface in this country, that sooner or later even politicians will have to cope with it?”

— Hunter S. Thompson

250. “I hate pain, despite my ability to tolerate it beyond all known parameters, which is not necessarily a good thing.”

— Hunter S. Thompson