Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson (July 18, 1937 – February 20, 2005), was an American journalist and author. He was known for his flamboyant writing style, known as Gonzo Journalism , which blurred the distinctions between writer and subject, fiction and non-fiction. Thompson died at his home in Woody Creek, Colorado, of what police officers stated was a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

See also: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998 movie)

Table of contents

1 Sourced 1.1 Hell's Angels (1966) 1.2 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) 1.3 Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 1.4 Welcome to the Big Darkness (July, 2003) 1.5 Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century (2004) 2 On politics and politicians 3 Attributed 4 External links

Sourced

• In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: Not necessarily to Win, but mainly to keep from Losing Completely.
  • Gonzo Papers, Vol. 1: The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (1979)

• There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die. Who knows? If there is in fact, a heaven and a hell, all we know for sure is that hell will be a visciously overcrowded version of Phoenix— a clean well lighted place full of sunshine and bromides and fast cars where almost everybody seems vaguely happy, except those who know in their hearts what is missing... And being driven slowly and quietly into the kind of terminal craziness that comes with finally understanding that the one thing you want is not there. Missing. Back-ordered. No tengo. Vaya con dios. Grow up! Small is better. Take what you can get....
  • Gonzo Papers, Vol. 2: Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80s (1988)

• Maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish— a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live out where the real winds blow— to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested...
  Res ipsa loquitar. Let the good times roll.
  • Gonzo Papers, Vol. 2: Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80s (1988)

• It is all well and good for children and acid freaks to still believe in Santa Claus— but it is still a profoundly morbid day for us working professionals. It is unsettling to know that one out of every twenty people you meet on Xmas will be dead this time next year....Some people can accept this, and some can't. That is why God made whiskey, and also why Wild Turkey comes in $300 shaped canisters during most of the Christmas season."
  • "Fear and Loathing in Elko" Rolling Stone (23 January 1992)

• There is a huge body of evidence to support the notion that me and the police were put on this earth to do extremely different things and never to mingle professionally with each other, except at official functions, when we all wear ties and drink heavily and whoop it up like the natural, good-humored wild boys that we know in our hearts that we are..These occasions are rare, but they happen— despite the forked tongue of fate that has put us forever on different paths....
  • "Fear and Loathing in Elko" Rolling Stone (23 January 1992)

• Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist, you have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it.
  • Associated Press interview (2003)

• But speaking of rules, you've been arrested dozens of times in your life. Specific incidents aside, what's common to these run-ins? Where do you stand vis-à-vis the law?

"Goddammit. Yeah, I have. First, there's a huge difference between being arrested and being guilty. Second, see, the law changes and I don't. How I stand vis-à-vis the law at any given moment depends on the law. The law can change from state to state, from nation to nation, from city to city. I guess I have to go by a higher law. How's that? Yeah, I consider myself a road man for the lords of karma."

• • Salon interview (3 February 2003)

• If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up.
  • Interview (1 November 2004)

Hell's Angels (1966)

• The hard core, the outlaw elite, were the Hell's Angels... wearing the winged death's-head on the back of their sleeveless jackets and packing their "mamas" behind them on big "chopped hogs." They rode with a fine unwashed arrogance, secure in their reputation as the rottenest motorcycle gang in the whole history of Christendom.

• 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 and farther down a blind alley…. Very few toads in this world are Prince Charmings in disguise. Most are simply toads… and they are going to stay that way… Toads don't make laws or change any basic structures, but one or two rooty insights can work powerful changes in the way they get through life. A toad who believes he got a raw deal before he even knew who was dealing will usually be sympathetic to the mean, vindictive ignorance that colors the Hell's Angels' view of humanity. There is not much mental distance between a feeling of having been screwed and the ethic of total retaliation, or at least the random revenge that comes with outraging the public decency.

• Tiny hurts people. When he loses his temper he goes completely out of control and his huge body becomes a lethal weapon. It is difficult to see what role he might play in the Great Society.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)

• We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.
  • First lines

• Why bother with newspapers, if this is all they offer? Agnew was right. The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits— a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.

• The sporting editors had also given me $300 in cash, most of which was already spent on extremely dangerous drugs. The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab.

• We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers … A quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.

• The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the sixth Reich. The ground floor is full of gambling tables, like all the other casinos . . . but the place is about four stories high, in the style of a circus tent, and all manner of strange County-Fair/Polish Carnival madness is going on up in this space.

• When you bring an act into this town, you want to bring it heavy. Don't waste any time with cheap shucks and misdemeanors. Go straight for the jugular. Get right into felonies.

• What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create ... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody— or at least some force— is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.

• We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark— the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72

• So much for Objective Journalism. Don’t bother to look for it here—not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.

• There is nothing so unusual, they tell me, about coming back to your car and finding the radio aerial torn off, the windshield wipers bent up in the air like spaghetti, and all the windows smashed…. for no particular reason except to make sure you know just exactly where it's at these days. Where indeed?

• 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.

• Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?

Welcome to the Big Darkness (July, 2003)

• When I went into the clinic last April 30, George Bush was about 50 points ahead of his closest Democratic opponent in next year's Presidential Election. When I finally escaped from the horrible place, less than three weeks late, Bush's job-approval ratings had been cut in half -- and even down into single digits, in some states -- and the Republican Party was panicked and on the run. It was a staggering reversal in a very short time, even shorter than it took for his equally crooked father to drop from 93 percent approval, down to as low as 43 percent and even 41 percent in the last doomed days of the first doomed Bush Administration. After that, he was Bill Clinton's punching bag.

• Richard Nixon could tell us a lot about peaking too early. He was a master of it, because it beat him every time. He never learned and neither did Bush the Elder.

• But wow! This goofy child president we have on our hands now. He is demonstrably a fool and a failure, and this is only the summer of '03. By the summer of 2004, he might not even be living in the White House. Gone, gone, like the snows of yesteryear.

• The Rumsfield-Cheney axis has self-destructed right in front of our eyes, along with the once-proud Perle-Wolfowitz bund that is turning to wax. They somehow managed to blow it all, like a gang of kids on a looting spree, between January and July, or even less. It is genuinely incredible. The U.S. Treasury is empty, we are losing that stupid, fraudulent chickencrap War in Iraq, and every country in the world except a handful of Corrupt Brits despises us. We are losers, and that is the one unforgiveable sin in America.
  • Welcome to the Big Darkness

Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century (2004)

• Morality is temporary, wisdom is permanent

• Paranoia is just another word for ignorance

• The only difference between the Sane and the Insane, in this world, is the Sane have the power to have the Insane locked up

• "All political power comes from the barrel of either guns, pussy, or opium pipes, and people seem to like it that way."

• "We are like pygmies lost in a maze. We are not at war, we are having a nervous breakdown."

• "I understand that fear is my friend, but not always. never turn your back on fear. It should always be in front of you, like a thing that might have to be killed. "

• "The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beggining of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic."

• "Who are these Swine ? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush ? ..... They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and viscious in the American character.... I piss down the throats of these Nazis. And i am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck Them."

• "Now, years later, i still have trouble when i think about Chicago (68'). That week at the Convention changed everything i'd ever taken for granted about this country and my place in it...Everytime i tried to tell somebody what happened in Chicago i began crying , and it took me years to understand why...Chicago was the End of the Sixties, for me."

On politics and politicians

• There is no way to grasp what a shallow, contemptible and hopelessly dishonest old hack Hubert Humphrey is until you've followed him around for a while.

• We disagree so violently on almost everything that it's a real pleasure to drink with him.
  • About Pat Buchanan in a letter to Garry Wills (October 17, 1973); published in Fear and Loathing in America (2000) ISBN 0-686-87315-X)

• There was one exact moment, in fact, when I knew for sure that Al Gore would never be President of the United States, no matter what the experts were saying— and that was when the whole Bush family suddenly appeared on TV and openly scoffed at the idea of Gore winning Florida. It was Nonsense, said the Candidate, Utter nonsense. . . Anybody who believed Bush had lost Florida was a Fool. The Media, all of them, were Liars & Dunces or treacherous whores trying to sabotage his victory. . . Here was the whole bloody Family laughing & hooting & sneering at the dumbness of the whole world on National TV. The old man was the real tip-off. The leer on his face was almost frightening. It was like looking into the eyes of a tall hyena with a living sheep in its mouth. The sheep's fate was sealed, and so was Al Gore's.
  • "The Fix is In" (November 27, 2000)

• The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now— with somebody— and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.
  • "Fear & Loathing in America" (September 12, 2001)

• It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy. . . We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows?
  • "Fear & Loathing in America" (September 12, 2001)

• This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed— for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now.
  • "When War Drums Roll" (September 17, 2001)

• The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what's coming now. The party's over, folks. . . [Censorship of the news] is a given in wartime, along with massive campaigns of deliberately-planted "Dis-information". That is routine behavior in Wartime— for all countries and all combatants— and it makes life difficult for people who value real news.
  • "When War Drums Roll" (September 17, 2001)

• This blizzard of mind-warping war propaganda out of Washington is building up steam. Monday is Anthrax, Tuesday is Bankruptcy, Friday is Child-Rape, Thursday is Bomb-scares, etc., etc., etc.... If we believed all the brutal, frat-boy threats coming out of the White House, we would be dead before Sunday. It is pure and savage terrorism reminiscent of Nazi Germany.
  • "Domestic terrorism at the Super Bowl" (February 11, 2002)

• We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear— fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts, or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer.
  • "Extreme behavior in Aspen" (February 3, 2003)

• It is hard to ignore the prima facie dumbness that got us bogged down in this nasty war in the first place. This is not going to be like Daddy's War, old sport. He actually won, and he still got run out of the White House nine months later.. . The whole thing sucks. It was wrong from the start, and it is getting wronger by the hour.
  • "Love in a Time of War" (March 31, 2003)

• Three journalists have died in Baghdad. . . American troops are killing journalists in a profoundly foreign country, under cover of a war being fought for savage, greed-crazed reasons that most of them couldn't explain or even understand.

• What the hell is going on here? How could this once-proud nation have changed so much, so drastically, in only a little more than two years. In what seems like the blink of an eye, this George Bush has brought us from a prosperous nation at peace to a broke nation at war.
  • "A Sad Week in America" (April 10, 2003)

• But wow! This goofy child president we have on our hands now. He is demonstrably a fool and a failure, and this is only the summer of '03. The American nation is in the worst condition I can remember in my lifetime, and our prospects for the immediate future are even worse. . . The Bush family must be very proud of themselves today, but I am not. Big Darkness, soon come. Take my word for it.
  • "Big Darkness" (July 22, 2003)

• The utter collapse of this Profoundly criminal Bush conspiracy will come none too soon for people like me. . . The massive plundering of the U.S. Treasury and all its resources has been almost on a scale that is criminally insane, and has literally destroyed the lives of millions of American people and American families. Exactly. You and me, sport— we are the ones who are going to suffer, and suffer massively. This is going to be just like the Book of Revelation said it was going to be— the end of the world as we knew it.
  • "The Nation's Capital" (July 29, 2003)

• I had a truly horrible dream last night. . . [Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mike Tyson and I] were on our way to a TV studio for a debate about his long-time working friendship with the powerful Bush family from Texas and how it might affect the next Bush presidency when The Terminator seizes power in Sacramento and tries to hand over the state's 54 electoral votes by election day in 2004. That is the basic plan behind Schwarzenegger running. He doesn't want to be Governor, he just wants the electoral votes to go to Bush this time.
  • "Nightmare in La-La-Land" (August 17, 2003)

• Why are we seeing George Bush on TV every two hours for nine or ten days at a time, like some kind of mutated Mr. Rogers clone? Something is dangerously wrong in any country where a monumentally-failed backwoods politician can scare our national TV networks so totally that they will give him anything he wants.
  • "The Bush League" (September 9, 2003)

• I have never had much faith in our embattled child President's decision-making powers ... I know that is not what you want to hear/read at this time, especially if you happen to be serving in the doomsday mess that is currently the U.S. Army.

• I take no pleasure in being Right in my dark predictions about the fate of our military intervention in the heart of the Muslim world. It is immensely depressing to me. Nobody likes to be betting against the Home team.
  • "Fast and Furious" (October 14, 2003)

• If we get chased out of Iraq with our tail between our legs, that will be the fifth consecutive Third-world country with no hint of a Navy or an Air Force to have whipped us in the past 40 years.
  • "Am I Turning Into a Pervert?'( November 18, 2003)

• This is no time for the "leader of the free world" to be falling asleep at massively-popular sporting events. . .Was [Bush] drunk? Does he fear the sight of an uncovered nipple? Was he lying? Does he believe in his heart that there are more evangelical Christians in this country than football fans and sex-crazed yoyos with unstable minds? Is he really as dumb as he looks and acts? These are all unsatisfactory questions at a time like this.

• Is it possible that he has already abandoned all hope of getting re-elected? Or does he plan to cancel the Election altogether by declaring a national military emergency with terrorists closing in from all sides, leaving him with no choice but to launch a huge bomb immediately?. . . Desperate men do desperate things, and stupid men do stupid things. We are in for a desperately stupid summer.
  • "Bush's Disturbing Sleeping Disorder" (February 18, 2004)

• For myself, I would much prefer to be stuck with Kentucky in the NCAA Tournament, than stuck with George Bush in the White House. It is the difference between losing your wallet at a cock fight and losing all your credit cards forever, along with your job and your house and your ability to earn enough money to pay off your sports-gambling debts or even a six-pack on game day. . .
  • "What's Better Than the Tournament?' (March 18, 2004)

• The 2004 presidential election will be a matter of life or death for the whole nation. We are sick today, and we will be even sicker tomorrow if this wretched half-bright swine of a president gets re-elected in November.
  • "The Big Finale Was a Big Disappointment" (April 6, 2004)

• "Not even the foulest atrocities of Adolf Hitler ever shocked me so badly as these Abu Ghraib photographs did."
  • "Let's Go to the Olympics!" (May 18, 2004)
    • (Later edited to read "These horrifying digital snapshots of the American dream in action on foreign soil are worse than anything even I could have expected.") Drudge Report (24 May 2004)

• These horrifying digital snapshots of the American dream in action on foreign soil are worse than anything even I could have expected. I have been in this business a long time and I have seen many staggering things, but this one is over the line. Now I am really ashamed to carry an American passport.
  • "Let's Go to the Olympics!" (May 18, 2004)

• Today, the Panzer-like Bush machine controls all three branches of our federal government, the first time that has happened since Calvin Coolidge was in the White House. And that makes it just about impossible to mount any kind of Congressional investigation of a firmly-entrenched president like George Bush. The time has come to get deeply into football. It is the only thing we have left that ain't fixed.
  • "The pain of losing" Hey Rube, HST's ESPN column (9 November 2004)

jmh

Attributed

• 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.

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

• I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me. **Variant: I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs, or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me.

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

• I have spent half my life trying to get away from journalism, but I am still mired in it - a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world full of misfits and drunkards and failures.

• 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.

• In the old days it was just a matter of being caught smoking cigarettes in the band room or drinking beer at lunchtime in the parking lot— and those crimes were serious, at the time, but they were not so serious as to get you expelled from the system forever. That is the hallmark of the Reagan Administration— a Punishment Ethic that permeates the whole infrastructure of American life and eventually gets down to George Orwell's notion, in Animal Farm, that "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

• 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.

• Objective journalism is one of the main reasons American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long. You can't be objective about Nixon.

• 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.

• 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

• There were other outlaws who missed the brass ring in the fifties. Lenny Bruce was one of them; he was never quite right for television. Bruce had tremendous potential until about 1961, when the people who had been getting such a kick out of him suddenly realized he was serious.

• Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of the rat race is not yet final.

• When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

External links

• ESPN Hunter S. Thompson Archive