Sic transit gloria mundi

Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

1937 - 2005

The bastards won.

Quotes:

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.

Call on God, but row away from the rocks.

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.

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

I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me.

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.

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.

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

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars.

No one holds command over me. No man. No god. No Prince. What is a claim of age for ones who are immortal? What is a claim of power for ones who defy death? Call your damnable hunt. We shall see whom I drag screaming to hell with me.

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?

In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upward mobile.

A cap of good acid costs five dollars and for that you can hear the Universal Symphony with God singing solo and the Holy Ghost on drums.

You can always turn your back on a person, but you can never turn your back on a drug... especially when it's waving a hunting knife in your eyes.

We'd be fools not to ride this strange torpedo to the end.

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.

Objective journalism is one of the main reasons American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long.

Being shot out of a cannon is always better than being squeezed through a tube.

That's fine, I said. But I couldn't really get into it. I was all for it, you understand, but only on the basis of a personal friendship. Most of my friends are into strange things I don't totally understand--and with a few shameful exceptions I wish them all well. Who am I, after all, to tell some friend that he shouldn't change his name to Oliver High, get rid of his family and join a Satanism cult in Seattle? Or to argue with another friend who wants to buy a single-shot Remington fireball so he can go out and shoot cops from a safe distance? Whatever's right, I say. Never fuck with a friend's head by accident. And if their private trips get out of control now and then--well, you do what has got to be done.

As you were, I was. As I am, you will be

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

Avoid being seized by the police. The cops are not your friends. Don't tell them anything.

Groveling is wrong for the soul, like grappling with whores in a drugstore.

Some may never live, but the crazy never die.

Get out of control, but appear under control. It's not bad to alarm other people, though - it's good for them.

Memorial Haiku