Top 500 Hunter S. Thompson Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “McGovern is the only major candidate – including Lindsay and Muskie – who invariably gives a straight answer when people raise these questions. He lines out the painful truth, and his reward has been just about the same as that of any other politician who insists on telling the truth: He is mocked, vilified, ignored, and abandoned as a hopeless loser by even his good old buddies like Harold Hughes. On.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

352. “The difference is as basic as between a professional football player and a rabid fan. One is a performer in a harsh, unique corner of reality; the other is a cultist, a passive worshiper, and occasionally a sloppy emulator of a style that fascinates him because it is so hopelessly remote from the reality he wakes up to every morning.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

353. “Whatever else might be said about Nixon – and there is still serious doubt in my mind that he could pass for Human – he is a goddamn stone fanatic on every facet of pro football.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

354. “We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

355. “All gamblers lose regularly, but they rarely discuss it in public. Losing is bad for the image, dude. Nobody buys Hot Tips from Losers. Remember that.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

356. “The only thing I ever saw that came close to Objective Journalism was a closed-circuit TV setup that watched shoplifters in the General Store at Woody Creek, Colorado.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

357. “For a loser, Vegas is the meanest town on earth.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

358. “One thing I have learned in my painful career as a gambler is that bragging when you get lucky and win a few games will plunge you into gloom and unacceptable beatings very soon. It happens every time.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

359. “Whatever he might have denied me was unimportant; it was the fact that he could deny me anything at all, even what I didn’t want.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

360. “All advice can only be a product of the man who gives it.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

361. “The waitress had the appearance of a very old hooker who had finally found her place in life.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

362. “The pleasure is in the path, the search for something good...”

— Hunter S. Thompson

363. “So if I decide to leap for The Fountain when I finish this memo, I want to make one thing perfectly clear – I would genuinely love to make that leap, and if I don’t I will always consider it a mistake and a failed opportunity, one of the very few serious mistakes of my First Life that is now ending.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

364. “It occurred to me one evening, as I sat by myself in Al’s patio, that a man can live on his wits and his balls for only so long. I’d been doing it for ten years and I had a feeling that my reserve was running low.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

365. “I wanted to take off all my clothes and never wear them again.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

366. “By any accepted standard, I have had more than nine lives. I counted them up once, and there were 13 times I almost and maybe should have died.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

367. “At the Tourist Bureau they talk about the cooling trade winds that caress the shores of Puerto Rico every day and night of the year – but Nelson Otto was a man the trade winds never seemed to touch.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

368. “Any combination of a 250-pound Mexican and LSD-25 is a potentially terminal menace for anything it can reach.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

369. “The sun woke me up the next morning. I sat up and groaned. My clothes were full of sand.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

370. “I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

371. “I just usually go with my own taste. If I like something, and it happens to be against the law, well, then I might have a problem.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

372. “You almost have to be a rock star to generate the kind of fever you need to survive in American politics.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

373. “Sunday is not a good day for traveling in the South. Most public places are closed – especially the bars and taverns – in order that the denizens of this steamy, atavistic region will not be distracted from church. Sunday is the Lord’s day, and in the South he still has clout – or enough, at least, so that most folks won’t cross him in public. And those few who can’t make it to church will likely stay home by the fan, with iced tea, and worship him in their own way.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

374. “This is one of the hallmarks of Vegas hospitality. The only bedrock rule is Don’t Burn the Locals. Beyond that, nobody cares. They would rather not know. If Charlie Manson checked into the Sahara tomorrow morning, nobody would hassle him as long as he tipped big.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

375. “Betting against the point spread is a relatively mechanical trip, but betting against another individual can be very complex, if you’re serious about it – because you want to know, for starters, whether you’re betting against a fool or a wizard, or maybe against somebody who’s just playing the fool.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

376. “I have always hated bowling, and I don’t mind admitting it.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

377. “In the argot of the cycle world the Harley is a “hog,” and the outlaw bike is a “chopped hog.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

378. “By disgracing and degrading the presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

379. “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. They worship money and power and death. Their ideal solution to all the nation’s problems would be another 100 Year War.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

380. “My attorney put down the phone after making several calls. “There’s only one place where we can get fresh salmon,” he said, “and it’s closed on Sunday.” “Of course,” I snapped. “These goddamn Jesus freaks! They’re multiplying like rats!”

— Hunter S. Thompson

381. “This wavering paradox is a pillar of the outlaw stance. A man who has blown all his options can’t afford the luxury of changing his ways. He has to capitalize on whatever he has left, and he can’t afford to admit-no matter how often he’s reminded of it-that every day of his life takes him farther down a blind alley.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

382. “How long can we maintain? I wonder. How long before one of us starts raving and jabbering at this boy? What will he think then? This same lonely desert was the last known home of the Manson family. Will he make that grim connection...”

— Hunter S. Thompson

383. “Watching TV becomes a full-time job when you can scan 200 channels all day and all night and still have the option of punching Night Dreams into the video machine, if the rest of the world seems dull.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

384. “Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era- the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be apart of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

385. “Assassins, like politicians and journalists, are not attracted to losers.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

386. “Anybody who thinks that ‘it doesn’t matter who’s President’ has never been Drafted and sent off to fight and die in a vicious, stupid war on the other side of the world – or been beaten and gassed by Police for trespassing on public property – or been hounded by the IRS for purely political reasons – or locked up in the Cook County Jail with a broken nose and no phone access and twelve perverts wanting to stomp your ass in the shower. That is when it matters who is President or Governor or Police Chief. That is when you will wish you had voted.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

387. “Chicago – this vicious, stinking zoo, this mean-grinning, Mace-smelling boneyard of a city; an elegant rockpile monument to everything cruel and stupid and corrupt in the human spirit.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

388. “One of the advantages of being dead, I guess, is that somebody else can edit all this.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

389. “I’ve already become a mastodon in print – I don’t see a consciousness for my kind of journalism.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

390. “A little bit of this town goes a very long way. After five days in Vegas you feel like you’ve been here for five years.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

391. “Life just seems too huge and too fascinating for me to begin thinking about curing my restlessness at this stage of the game. Maybe later.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

392. “Happy,” I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don’t have much faith in them and I am no exception – especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far to relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they’re scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

393. “The car suddenly veered off the road and we came to a sliding halt in the gravel. I was hurled against the dashboard. My attorney was slumped over the wheel. “What’s wrong?” I yelled. “We can’t stop here. This is bat country!”

— Hunter S. Thompson

394. “A man has to BE something; he has to matter.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

395. “I don’t think that my kind of journalism has ever been universally popular. It’s lonely out here.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

396. “It was a maddening image and the only way to whip it was to hang on until dusk and banish the ghosts with rum.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

397. “It’s much more fun to run a political campaign than it is to be the candidate.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

398. “Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective. So it would seem foolish, would it not, to adjust our lives to the demands of a goal we see from a different angle everyday? How could we ever hope to accomplish anything anther than galloping neurosis?”

— Hunter S. Thompson

399. “In four short years he has turned our country from a prosperous nation at peace into a desperately indebted nation at war. But so what? He is the President of the United States, and you’re not. Love it or leave it.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

400. “I bought a small bottle of beer for fifteen cents and sat on a bench in the clearing, feeling like an old man. The scene I had just witnessed brought back a lot of memories – not of things I had done but of things I had 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