Hunter S. Thompson

The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage & whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy - then go back to the office & sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece. Probably the rarest form of life in American politics is the man who can turn on a crowd & still keep his head straight - assuming it was straight in the first place.

The streets of every city in America are filled with men who would pay all the money they could lay their hands on to be transformed, even for a day, into hairy, hard-fisted brutes who walk all over cops, extort drinks from terrified bartenders and roar out of town on big motorcycles after raping the banker's daughter.

We came down here to see this teddible scene: people all pissed out of their minds and vomiting on themselves and all that and now, you know what? It's us

At age 22 I set what I insist is an all-time record for distance hitchhiking in Bermuda shorts: 3,700 miles in three weeks.

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

The massive, frustrated energies of a mainly young, disillusioned electorate that has long since abandoned the idea that we all have a duty to vote. This is like being told you have a duty to buy a new car, but you have to choose immediately between a Ford and a Chevy.

I need beaches, and blackness, and moonlit nakedness.

Nixon was a professional politician, and I despised everything he stood for -- but if he were running for president this year against the evil Bush-Cheney gang, I would happily vote for him.

Most people who deal in words don't have much faith in them and I am no exception.

Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

The Sixties were an era of extreme reality. I miss the smell of tear gas. I miss the fear of getting beaten.

Walk tall, kick ass, learn to speak Arabic, love music and never forget you come from a long line of truth seekers, lovers and warriors.

Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life.

Cover a war in a place where you can't drink beer or talk to a woman? Hell no!

I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger: A man on the move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.

These things happen. One day you run everything, and the next day you run like a dog.

Things are no longer what they seem to be. My telephones are haunted, and animals whisper at me from unseen places.

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.

But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing.

No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.