Top 500 Hunter S. Thompson Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “If we get chased out of Iraq with our tail between our legs, that will be the fifth consecutive Third-world country with no hint of a Navy or an Air Force to have whipped us in the past 40 years.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

302. “All golfers fear the one-iron. It has no angle, no loft. The one-iron is a confidence-crusher, a fear trip, an almost guarantee of shame, failure, dumbness and humiliation if you ever use it in public.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

303. “A sense of humor is the main measure of sanity.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

304. “If you have half a story and you don’t know the rest, you use what you have to pry the rest out of someone.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

305. “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.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

306. “I damn well intend to keep on living the way I think I should.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

307. “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.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

308. “Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole life-style a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

309. “Not even the foulest atrocities of Adolf Hitler ever shocked me so badly as these Abu Ghraib photographs did.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

310. “Hit him again, Jack! He’s crazy!”

— Hunter S. Thompson

311. “The next MVP of the Super Bowl is just as likely to have been a full-time grocery store bagger last year as a Heisman Trophy winner.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

312. “He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

313. “There is no way to understand the public reaction to the sight of a Freak smashing a coconut with a hammer on the hood of a white Cadillac in a Safeway parking lot unless you actually do it, and I tell you it’s tense.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

314. “No cop was ever born who wasn’t a sucker for a finely-executed high-speed Controlled Drift all the way around one of those clover-leaf freeway interchanges.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

315. “Gambling can turn into a dangerous two-way street when you least expect it. Weird things happen suddenly, and your life can go all to pieces.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

316. “I am an Addictive Personality, they say, a natural slave to passion – and many Doctors have warned me against it. I am a High-risk Patient.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

317. “Myths and legends die hard in America.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

318. “It’s the difference between watching a football game between two teams you don’t care about, and watching a game where you have some kind of personal identity with one of the teams, if only a huge bet.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

319. “Democracy as a system has evolved into something that Thomas Jefferson didn’t anticipate.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

320. “Why did she have to happen? Just when I was doing so good without her.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

321. “Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off.” – J. Conrad.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

322. “Richard Nixon was a criminally insane Monster – Bill Clinton is a black-hearted Swine of a friend.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

323. “The scene I had just witnessed brought back a lot of memories – not of things I have done but of things I have failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because time had eaten so much of my life and I would never get it back.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

324. “You can’t hoard fun. It has no shelf life.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

325. “I had a soft spot in my heart for Ronald Regan, if only because he was a sportswriter in his youth, and also because his wife gave the best head in Hollywood.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

326. “I went to the Democratic Convention as a journalist, and returned a cold-blooded revolutionary.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

327. “I had a soft-spot in my heart for Ronald Reagan, if only because he was a sportswriter in his youth.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

328. “Children are like TV sets. When they start acting weird, whack them across the head with a big rubber basketball shoe.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

329. “We must have football. What would this country be without football in October?”

— Hunter S. Thompson

330. “Though I was careful never to mention it, I began to see a new dimension in everything that happened.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

331. “I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

332. “Any kind of political campaign that taps the kind of energy that nothing else can reach would generate a tremendous high for everybody involved in it.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

333. “I knew a Buddhist once, and I’ve hated myself ever since.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

334. “The first paragraph. The last paragraph. That’s where the story is going and how it’s going to end. Or else you’ll go off in a hundred different directions.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

335. “The greatest mania of all is passion: and I am a natural slave to passion: the balance between my brain and my soul and my body is as wild and delicate as the skin of a Ming vase.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

336. “Most people who deal in words don’t have much faith in them and I am no exception.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

337. “Nixon was a bad loser. He hated losing worse than death, and that is why I enjoyed him. We were both football fans, both addicts; and on some days, nothing else mattered.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

338. “How many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote FOR something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?”

— Hunter S. Thompson

339. “Sportswriters are a rude and brainless subculture of fascist drunks.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

340. “I think I’m going to have to get a flying license very soon, and maybe one of those Lear jets. It beats motorcycles all to hell.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

341. “Nearly everyone who has ridden a bike for any length of time will agree. 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

342. “I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, but I will not make that mistake again. The joke is over for Nader. He was funny once, but now he belongs to the dead.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

343. “There is nothing Modern about doing dumb things for dumb reasons.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

344. “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. Their only common ground is their disdain for the present, or the status quo.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

345. “There is always room for losers in the football business. They are the mother’s milk of gambling, and why not? Somebody has to do it, or there won’t be any winners.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

346. “No, it was too much. The line between madness and masochism was already hazy; the time had come to pull back... to retire, hunker down, back off and “cop out,” as it were. Why not? in every gig like this, there comes a time to either cut your losses or consolidate your winnings – whichever fits.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

347. “Sending Muskie against Nixon would have been like sending a three-toed sloth out to seize turf from a wolverine.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

348. “There was no moon, but I could hear the surf a few yards in front of us. I spread my filthy cord coat on the sand for a pillow, then fell down and went to sleep.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

349. “There is a huge body of evidence to support the notion that me and the police were put on this earth to do extremely different things and never to mingle professionally with each other, except at official functions, when we all wear ties and drink heavily and whoop it up like the natural, good-humored wild boys that we know in our hearts that we are... These occasions are rare, but they happen – despite the forked tongue of fate that has put us forever on different paths...”

— Hunter S. Thompson

350. “It was almost May. I knew that New York was getting warm now, that London was wet, that Rome was hot – and I was on Vieques, where it was always hot and where New York and London and Rome were just names on a map.”

— Hunter S. Thompson