Top 500 Hunter S. Thompson Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “One of the advantages of being dead, I guess, is that somebody else can edit all this.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

402. “It is like sitting in a traffic jam on the San Diego Freeway with your windows rolled up and Portuguese music booming out of the surround-sound speakers while animals gnaw on your neck and diseased bill collectors hammer on your doors with golf clubs.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

403. “The only thing wrong with the NBA – or any other professional sport, for that matter – is a wild epidemic of Dumbness and overweening Greed. There is no Mystery about it, and no need to change any rules.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

404. “Those were the good mornings, when the sun was hot and the air was quick and promising, when the Real Business seemed right on the verge of happening and I felt that if I went just a little faster I might overtake that bright and fleeting thing that was always just ahead.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

405. “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

406. “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

407. “I measure my life in pages. If I have pages at dawn, it’s been a good night.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

408. “I’ll call New York for some cash.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

409. “The root assumption here is that neither party would nominate a man more than 20 percent different from the type of person most Americans consider basically right and acceptable. Which almost always happens. There is no potentially serious candidate in either major party this year who couldn’t pass for the executive vice-president for mortgage loans in any hometown bank from Bangor to San Diego. We.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

410. “The Angels are not articulate about many things, but they bring a lover’s inspiration to the subject of bikes.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

411. “I’ve been studying drugs for years.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

412. “Well,” he said. “I hope to God I never make forty – I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

413. “If you consider the great journalists in history, you don’t see too many objective journalists on that list.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

414. “I am a professional sportswriter, among other things, and I take the games seriously. It is only one of my many powerful addictions, and I don’t mind admitting any of them.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

415. “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

416. “It was easy to understand why Sala didn’t mind sharing; neither of us ever went there except to change clothes or sleep. Night after night I would sit uselessly at Al’s, drinking myself into a stupor because I couldn’t stand the idea of going back to the apartment.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

417. “Hungry people have the cunning of wild beasts.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

418. “I harbor a secret urge to whack a salesman in the face, crack his teeth and put red bumps around his eyes.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

419. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised, as hideous and dumb as it sounds, at an invasion of Iraq.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

420. “O. J. Simpson drew bigger crowds, but most of his admirers were around 12 years old. Two-thirds of them were black and many looked like fugitives from the Credit Bureau’s garnishee file.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

421. “Losing in New Hampshire was usually permanent, and winning was a guaranteed fast ride to somewhere – maybe the White House – or at least a fiery exit. Probably soon, but so what?”

— Hunter S. Thompson

422. “Nixon was no more a saint than he was a great president.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

423. “Any candidate who’d offered a real possibility of an alternative to Nixon – someone with a different concept of the presidency – could have challenged him and come very close to beating him.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

424. “Every now and then you have to get away from that ugly Old Politics trip, or it will drive you to kicking the walls and hurling AR3′s into the fireplace.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

425. “Publishers are notoriously slothful about numbers, unless they’re attached to dollar signs – unlike journalists, quarterbacks, and felony criminal defendants who tend to be keenly aware of numbers at all times.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

426. “Yeah, I guess I am,” said one. “But you’re looking at one loser who’s going to make a hell of a scene on the way out.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

427. “Cover a war in a place where you can’t drink beer or talk to a woman? Hell no!”

— Hunter S. Thompson

428. “I guess that’s one of the things about growing up in the fifties – it never occurred to me that you wouldn’t be at least as successful as your parents.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

429. “I think you either have to have a very strong decisive person at the top or else a really brilliant staff command.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

430. “I have always loved blizzards, if only because of the driving experience – which is definitely an acquired taste.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

431. “I may sound a little black, but I’m really pretty well adjusted.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

432. “You will be flogged for being right and flogged for being wrong, and it hurts both ways – but it doesn’t hurt as much when you’re right.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

433. “ROSS PEROT was the best thing that happened in American politics since Richard Nixon acquired a taste for gin. In both cases, the political dialogue of the day was enriched by spontaneous gibberish that entertained the wrong people and made the right ones question their faith.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

434. “Look what happened the last time a Republican president tried to fix a doomed national economy. Remember Herbert Hoover?”

— Hunter S. Thompson

435. “You have to be very mean to get a laugh on the campaign trail. There is no such thing as paranoia.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

436. “The room was very quiet. I walked over to the TV set and turned it on to a dead channel-white noise at maximum decibels, a fine sound for sleeping, a powerful continuous hiss to drown out everything strange.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

437. “Las Vegas makes Reno seem like your friendly neighborhood grocery store.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

438. “Oral Roberts is a greed-crazed white-trash lunatic who should have been hung upside down from a telephone pole on the outskirts of Tulsa 44 years ago, before he somehow transmogrified into the money-sucking animal that he became when he discovered television.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

439. “The bulk of the crowd looked like professors and their wives from Amherst. One of the problems, according to a bushy young radical-talking non-student from Boston, was that you had to pay a “registration fee” of two dollars before you got a vote.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

440. “And only those who can see above and beyond the American goal of respectable mediocrity can enjoy a life that leads to anything but a struggle to attain that end.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

441. “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

442. “For all his Caribbean clothes and his Madison Avenue manners, even with his surfside apartment and his Alfa Romeo roadster, there was so much Kansas in Sanderson that it was embarrassing to see him deny it.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

443. “Right next to me a huge reptile was gnawing on a woman’s neck, the carpet was a blood-soaked sponge – impossible to walk on it, no footing at all. “Order some golf shoes,” I whispered. “Otherwise, we’ll never get out of this place alive. You notice these lizards don’t have any trouble moving around in this muck – that’s because they have claws on their feet.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

444. “All around us were people I had spent ten years avoiding – shapeless women in wool bathing suits, dull-eyed men with hairless legs and self-conscious laughs, all Americans, all fearsomely alike. These people should be kept at home, I thought; lock them in the basement of some goddamn Elks Club and keep them pacified with erotic movies; if they want a vacation, show them a foreign art film; and if they still aren’t satisfied, send them into the wilderness and run them with vicious dogs.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

445. “I felt a little guilty about jangling the poor bugger’s brains with that evil fantasy. But what the hell? Anybody who wanders around the world saying, “Hell yes, I’m from Texas,” deserves whatever happens to him.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

446. “You’d be surprised at the things people will do in order to get their names or pictures in the paper.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

447. “They were professionally deviant, but they had a few things in common. They depended, mostly from habit, on newspapers and magazines for the bulk of their income; their lives were geared to long chances and sudden movement; and they claimed no allegiance to any flag and valued no currency but luck and good contacts.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

448. “He gave my hand a final shake. “Okay, Kemp,” he said with a grin. “Thanks a lot – you came through like a champ.” “Hell,” I said, starting the engine. “We’re all champs when we’re drunk.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

449. “Young George spent more money on one day of his Inauguration Ceremonies than Richard Nixon did on his whole Campaign in 1972 – and Nixon was crucified as a Criminal Spendthrift with the ethics of a snake.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

450. “The importance of Liking Yourself is a notion that fell heavily out of favor during the coptic, anti-ego frenzy of the Acid Era – but nobody guessed back then that the experiment might churn up this kind of hangover: a whole subculture of frightened illiterates with no faith in anything.”

— Hunter S. Thompson