Top 500 Hunter S. Thompson Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

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

— Hunter S. Thompson

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

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

— Hunter S. Thompson

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

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

— Hunter S. Thompson

365. “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

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

— Hunter S. Thompson

367. “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

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

— Hunter S. Thompson

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

— Hunter S. Thompson

370. “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

371. “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

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

— Hunter S. Thompson

373. “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

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

— Hunter S. Thompson

375. “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

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

— Hunter S. Thompson

377. “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

378. “Living on pills, phone calls unmade, people unseen, pages unwritten, money unmade, pressure piling up all around to make some kind of breakthrough and get moving again. Get the gum off the rails, finish something, croak this awful habit of not ever getting to the end- of anything.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

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

— Hunter S. Thompson

380. “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

381. “This maybe the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it – that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

382. “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

383. “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

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

— Hunter S. Thompson

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

— Hunter S. Thompson

386. “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

387. “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

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

— Hunter S. Thompson

389. “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

390. “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

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

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

— Hunter S. Thompson

395. “Most of my stuff is just a series of false leads. I’ll approach a story as a subject and then make a whole bunch of different runs at the lead. They’re all good writing but they don’t connect. So I end up having to string leads together.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

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

— Hunter S. Thompson

397. “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

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

— Hunter S. Thompson

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

— Hunter S. Thompson

Featured in: Fun Quotes

400. “Arriving half-drunk in a foreign place is hard on the nerves. You have a feeling that something is wrong, that you can’t get a grip.”

— Hunter S. Thompson