Talk:Hunter S. Thompson

New

 * Isn't "faster, faster, until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death" attributed to HST?


 * Someone screwed this page up and removed much of the quotage. The last good revision was (cur) (last)  22:44, 24 Mar 2005 Alan J Franklin (+items from: "Welcome...").  I hope someone will fix this, since I don't know how to import the wiki "code" directly from an old revision, I can only copy and paste.


 * anyone have the quote about clinton not recognizing the saxophone reed thingy that hst had brought as a gift when rolling stone sat three writers down with the man who would be just after they decided to give him the cover that month? can't recall it precisely enought to quote.

Hunter S. Thompson
My son Simon, like myself, is/was a fan of Hunter's literary style and unique insight. On learning of Hunter's suicide, he sent me an email as follows:

"I always knew he would be killed by some deranged psychopath...bummer."

I think Hunter would approve.

KR Edwards

It's hard to say why I'm so upset by his death. It could be the witty jokes, or insight to a life worth living... but in reality it's losing a voice. As long as he was out there seeing things through his eyes - eyes capable of seeing that high water mark in Las Vegas - it felt like someone was willing to speak the truth. Brutal honesty took a hit here too. RIP Hunter

GVS

No quotes from Where the Buffalo Roam?

Anonymous Inquisitor

"What kind of women can you get? You've got shitty dope!"

Back to what GVS said, you are absolutely correct, and WOW, well spoken your correctness is too. The greatest tragedy of death is not the decay of flesh, or some metaphysical passage of smokey spirit stuff into some dark unknown future. The real tragedy is a loss of a voice. Its the silencing of an intentional source of information. Fear not death, and loath not loss my friend. I promise you that his voice has lived on, and the simple fact that it can be heard so clearly after his death is a testament to its truth and profoundity in life.

I imagine he is actually being recultured in some horribly monsterous cryogenic lab in Roswell. Him and Elvis will be flying high together in some lightspeed portable alien utopia in no time flat.

Alexander Strampen

Quote out of context
The quote from Kingdom of Fear about Bob Dylan jacking off in an XXX theater while stroking the spine of a fat young boy is taken out of context. HST expressed considerable horror in the sentences after this quote at even thinking up such an image. I don't have my copy of the book with me right now, so I can't add to it with certainty. Is there some policy about taking quotes out of context in a way that reflects in an extremely negative way on the author? It's not a really important quote, and I personally think it should be removed, but if not, I think it should be added to so as to avoid making HST look like a deranged pedophile. Any thoughts, anyone? Belial 20:51, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

If you can reference it, add it. There is nothing wrong with quoting negative comments, as long as you point out that he later showed regret for having made such a statement. Its part of who he was, he was not perfect, but he was aware of how and when he was on the verge of vitriol, or standing in a puddle of it. If anyone can find and quote this statement in Kingdom of Fear, I urge you to do it.

Human or dancer
The chorus of the song Human by The Killers, "are we human or are we dancer?", is based on something Hunter S. Thompson once wrote. Source: "He says the lyrics were inspired by a disparaging comment made by Hunter S. Thompson about how America was raising a generation of Tony Danzas." (people who follow a pattern similar to the dim witted albeit big hearted stay at home father and nanny in TV's "Who's the Boss") I wonder if anyone has the exact quote and a trustworthy source. --82.171.70.54 18:24, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Me, too. --16:49, 19 January 2009

here's a source for the direct quote:

I think what we actually want is the HST quote referring to the "generation of dancers." I can't find it anywhere... anyone else?

Any luck finding the HST quote? It is now January 2015.

I saw this on Twitter by Jon Huber (@TheCrownedHeads) which might shed further light on the quote: "America is raising a generation of dancers, afraid to take one step out of line." - Hunter S. Thompson #CYOP" 9th June 2018

Unsourced
The following unsourced statements have been removed to here from the main article. Please provide citations before re-adding them. ~ Ningauble 13:03, 10 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Breakfast is the only meal of the day that I tend to view with the same kind of traditionalized reverence that most people associate with Lunch and Dinner. I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours, and mine is breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas or at home — and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed — breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess. The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crepes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned beef hash with diced chiles, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of Key lime pie, two margaritas, and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert…. Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next twenty-four hours and at least one source of good music…. All of which should be dealt with outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked.


 * "The third president, Thomas Jefferson, had a vision of America. He believed that this whole new country, this giant unformed continent offered a chance to start again. The premise was very simple. That human beings acting in a sense of enlightened self interest are smart enough to do the right thing and know the truth. America could have been a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race. Instead, we just moved in here and destroyed the place from coast to coast like killer snails. Everybody wants power over a country that's had it's day. I think we're finished."


 * I have never been able to properly explain myself in this climate.
 * Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas


 * Fear? I know not fear. There are only moments of confusion. Some of them are deeply stamped on my memory and a few will haunt me forever.
 * Kingdom of Fear


 * A word to the wise is infuriating.


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


 * Good people drink good beer.


 * 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 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."


 * 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.
 * I have re-added this one, with the source. Oktalist (talk) 19:33, 11 March 2016 (UTC)


 * 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 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. -Hells Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga


 * 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.


 * Some may never live, but the crazy never die.


 * Pray to God, but row away from the rocks.


 * The last train out of any station will not be full of nice guys.


 * Politics is the art of controlling your environment. That is one of the key things I learned in these years, and I learned it the hard way. Anybody who thinks that 'it doesn't matter who's President' has never been Drafted and sent off to fight and die in a vicious, stupid War on the other side of the World — or been beaten and gassed by Police for trespassing on public property — or been hounded by the IRS for purely political reasons — or locked up in the Cook County Jail with a broken nose and no phone access and twelve perverts wanting to stomp your ass in the shower. That is when it matters who is President or Governor or Police Chief. That is when you will wish you had voted.


 * He knew who I was, at that time, because I had a reputation as a writer. I knew he was part of the Bush dynasty. But he was nothing, he offered nothing, and he promised nothing. He had no humour. He was insignificant in every way and consequently I didn't pay much attention to him. But when he passed out in my bathtub, then I noticed him. I'd been in another room, talking to the bright people. I had to have him taken away.
 * Thompson on George W. Bush


 * I heard the music, and I wrote to it. Some people beat drums. Some people strum guitars. It’s all in the music you hear.


 * It’s a stupid, dangerous, HELLISH world . . . But don’t let it FRIGHTEN you!!


 * Buy the ticket, take the ride.
 * I suspect this saying antedates Thompson by a generation or more. ~ Ningauble 14:07, 22 January 2010 (UTC)


 * I feel the same way about disco as I do about herpes.
 * Speech given to the University of Colorado Student Union (1977-11-01)


 * 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.


 * 'Bill Clinton does not inhale marijuana, right? You bet. Like I chew on LSD but I don't swallow it.


 * 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.


 * 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.


 * 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.


 * Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism — which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.
 * Better than Sex


 * “I unfortunately proved what I set out to prove, and it was more a political point than a local election, and I think the original reason was to prove it to myself, that the American Dream really is fucked.”
 * after losing the local election for sheriff

drawing
There must be a better free drawing or photo of Hunter S Thompson to use here? 130.166.74.86 00:52, 22 April 2009 (UTC)