Tragic Genius: Quotes from Hunter S. Thompson

A word to the wise is infuriating.

America... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

Call on God, but row away from the rocks.

For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.

Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole life-style a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect.

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

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

If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

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

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.

It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.

No man is so foolish but he may sometimes give another good counsel, and no man so wise that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than his own. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master.

Of all the men that have run for president in the twentieth century, only George McGovern truly understood what a monument America could be to the human race.

Politics is the art of controlling your environment.

That was always the difference between Muhammad Ali and the rest of us. He came, he saw, and if he didn't entirely conquer - he came as close as anybody we are likely to see in the lifetime of this doomed generation.

The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.

The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.

The person who doesn't scatter the morning dew will not comb gray hairs.

The trouble with Nixon is that he's a serious politics junkie. He's totally hooked and like any other junkie, he's a bummer to have around, especially as President.

The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

You better take care of me Lord, if you don't you're gonna have me on your hands.