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Thursday, February 25, 2010

The Wisdom of Hunter S. Thompson

Some of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite writers, ever. "The Great Shark Hunt" should be required reading for anyone interested in journalism or political science.


"If I'd written 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."

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

"In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upwardly 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. We owe that to ourselves and our crippled self-image as something better than a nation of panicked sheep."

"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me. "

"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. "

"There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge."

"Jesus! How much more of this cheap-jack bullshit can we be expected to take from that stupid little gunsel? Who gives a fuck if he's lonely and depressed down there in San Clemente? If there were any such thing as true justice in this world, his rancid carcass would be somewhere down around Easter Island right now, in the belly of a hammerhead shark. "
(HST on Richard Nixon, post resignation)

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

"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."


...and my two personal, all time favorite HST quotes:

"Buy the ticket, take the ride."

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

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