Hunter S. Thompson Quotes

“A man has to be something; he has to matter.”

“Anything worth doing, is worth doing right.”

“Freedom is something that dies unless it's used.”

“I feel the same way about disco as I do about herpes.”

“I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.”

“I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.”

“If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up.”

“It never got weird enough for me.”

“Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain on the roof and instant coffee, to unemployment insurance and library cards, to absinthe and good-hearted landlords, to music and warm bodies and contraceptives… and to the 'good life', whatever it is and wherever it happens to be.”

“Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.”

“Sex without love is as hollow and ridiculous as love without sex.”

“So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?”

“Some may never live, but the crazy never die.”

“The edge, there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is the ones who have gone over.”

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.”

“Beware of enthusiasm and of love, both are temporary and quick to sway.”

“In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.”

“Never do anything the person standing in front of you can't understand.”

“No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride… and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well… maybe chalk it off to forced conscious expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten.”

“Too weird to live, too rare to die!”

“All my life, my heart has sought a thing I cannot name.”

“Morality is temporary, wisdom is permanent.”

“Weird behavior is natural in smart children, like curiosity is to a kitten.”

“Yesterday's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why.”

“A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.”

“I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.”

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!”

“We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and — in spite of True Romance magazines — we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely — at least, not all the time — but essentially, and finally, alone.

This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.”

“I was not proud of what I had learned but I never doubted that it was worth knowing.”