Hunter S Thompson Journalism Quotes

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 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.

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.

Don't judge your taco by its price

Journalism is "a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world 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.

We have bigger things to brood on and enormous reasons for wallowing in terminal craziness until we finally hit bottom.

How long can we maintain? I wonder. How long before one of us starts raving and jabbering at this boy? What will he think then? This same lonely desert was the last known home of the Manson family. Will he make that grim connection..

Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

The best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism.

You will be flogged for being right and flogged for being wrong, and it hurts both ways--but it doesn't hurt as much when you're right.

The only way to write honestly about the scene is to be part of it. If there is one quick truism about psychedelic drugs, it is that anyone who tries to write about them without first-expierience is a fool and a fraud.

The line between madness and masochism was already hazy;

The only thing I ever saw that came close to Objective Journalism was a closed-circuit TV setup that watched shoplifters in the General Store at Woody Creek, Colorado.

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.

They would owe most of their success to a curious rape mania that rides on the shoulder of American journalism like some jeering, masturbating raven. Nothing grabs an editor's eye like a good rape.

I was so far beyond simple fatigue that I was beginning to feel nicely adjusted to the idea of permanent hysteria.

What sells, today, is whatever Fucks You Up - whatever short-circuits your brain and grounds it out for the longest possible time.

Some asshole wrote a poem about that once. It’s probably good advice, if you have shit for brains.

How many more nights and weird mornings can this terrible shit go on? How long can the body and the brain tolerate this doom-struck craziness?

Journalism, to me, is just another drug – a free ride to scenes I'd probably miss if I stayed straight. But I'm neither a chemist nor an editor; all I do is take the pill or the assignment and see what happens. Now and then I get a bad trip, but experience has made me more careful about what I buy... so if you have a good pill I'm open; I'll try almost anything that hasn't bitten me in the past.

Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard

A natural street freak, just eating whatever came by.

Tune in, freak out, get beaten. It’s all in Kesey’s Bible. … The Far Side of Reality. And

Right,” I said. “But first we need the car. And after that, the cocaine. And then the tape recorder, for special music, and some Acapulco shirts.

I do it for the music.

of those days when everything’s in vain … a stone bummer from start to finish; and if you know what’s good for you, on days like these you sort of hunker down in a safe corner and watch.

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 contradiction in terms.

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.

No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride … and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well … maybe chalk it off to forced consciousness expansion:

The daily press is the evil principle of the modern world, and time will only serve to disclose this fact with greater and greater clearness. The capacity of the newspaper for degeneration is sophistically without limit, since it can always sink lower and lower in its choice of readers. At last it will stir up all those dregs of humanity which no state or government can control. —Sören Kierkegaard The Last Years: Journals 1853–55

Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run … but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. … History

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

Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas. To relax, as it were, in the womb of the desert sun.

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,

The truth is that The Wild One -- despite an admittedly fictional treatment -- was an inspired piece of film journalism. Instead of institutionalizing common knowledge, in the style of Time, it told a story that was only beginning to happen and which was inevitably influenced by the film. It gave the outlaws a lasting, romance-glazed image of themselves, a coherent reflection that only a very few had been able to find in a mirror, and it quickly became the bike rider's answer to The Sun Also Rises. The image is not valid, but its wide acceptance can hardly be blamed on the movie. The Wild One was careful to distinguish between "good outlaws" and "bad outlaws," but the people who were most influenced chose to identify with Brando instead of Lee Marvin whose role as the villain was a lot more true to life than Brando's portrayal of the confused hero. They saw themselves as modern Robin Hoods ... virile, inarticulate brutes whose good instincts got warped somewhere in the struggle for self-expression and who spent the rest of their violent lives seeking revenge on a world that done them wrong when they were young and defenseless.

We are drifting into some ugly parallels here, and if I'd written this kind of thing two years ago I'd pick up the New York Times and see myself mangled all over the Op-Ed page... And then beaten into a bloody coma the next evening by some hired thugs in an alley behind the National Press Building.....

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 gross contradiction in terms.

Right next to me a huge reptile was gnawing on a woman’s neck, the carpet was a blood-soaked sponge—impossible to walk on it, no footing at all. “Order some golf shoes,” I whispered. “Otherwise, we’ll never get out of this place alive. You notice these lizards don’t have any trouble moving around in this muck—that’s because they have claws on their feet.

من يجعل من نفسه وحشًا، يتخلص من ألم الإنسانية

leave the other stuff to Life

Now they looked like somebody had just sprayed their table with shit-mist. Nobody said a word. They ate quickly, and left without tipping. So

Right,” I said. “But first we need the car. And after that, the cocaine. And then the tape recorder, for special music, and some Acapulco

Look over there,” I said. “Two women fucking a polar bear.” “Please,” he said. “Don’t tell me those things. Not now.

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

I was not proud of what I had learned, but I never doubted that it was worth knowing.

… 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 daily press is the evil principle of the modern world, and time will only serve to disclose this fact with greater and greater clearness. The capacity of the newspaper for degeneration is sophistically without limit, since it can always sink lower and lower in its choice of readers. At last it will stir up all those dregs of humanity which no state or government can control. —Sören Kierkegaard The Last Years: Journals 1853–55

Att’y: Are your eyes blue or green? Waitress: Pardon? Att’y: Blue or green? Waitress: They change. Att’y: Like a lizard? Waitress: Like a cat. Att’y: Oh, the lizard changes the color of his skin … Waitress: Want anything to drink? Att’y: Beer. And I have beer in the car. Tons of it. The whole back seat’s full of it. Duke: I don’t like mixing coconuts up with beer and hamburgers.

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.” ― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

He disappeared inside and I leaned back on the seat to stare straight up the star-crazed sky. It seemed about 6 feet above my eyes. Or maybe 60 feet, or 600. I couldn't be sure, and it didn't matter, anyway, because by that time I was convinced I was in the cockpit of a 727 coming into LA at midnight. Jesus, I thought, I am ripped straight to the tits. Where am I? Are we going up or down? Somewhere in the back of my brain, I knew I was sitting in a Jeep in the parking lot of a night club on an island off the Mexican coast - but how could I really be sure, with another part of my brain convinced that I was looking down on the huge glittering bowl of Los Angeles from the cockpit of a 727? Was that the Milky Way? Or Sunset Boulevard? Orion, or the Beverly Hills Hotel? Who gives a fuck? I thought.

Suddenly I was tired of Lotterman; he was a phony and he didn't even know it. He was forever yapping about freedom of the press and keeping the paper going, but if he'd had a million dollars and all the freedom in the world he'd still put out a worthless newspaper because he wasn't smart enough to put out a good one. He was just another noisy little punk in the great legion of punks who marched between the banners of bigger and better men. Freedom, Truth, Honour — you could rattle off a hundred such words and behind every one of them would gather a thousand punks, pompous little farts, waving the banner with one hand and reaching under the table with the other. I stood up. "Ed," I said using his name for the first time, "I believe I'll quit.

MH: In an early letter to William Kennedy you spoke of the "dry rot" of American journalism. Tell me what you think. What's the state of the American press currently? HST: The press today is like the rest of the country. Maybe you need a war. Wars tend to bring out out the best in them. War was everywhere you looked in the sixties, extending into the seventies. Now there are no wars to fight. You know, it's the old argument about why doesn't the press report the good news? Well, now the press is reporting the good news, and it's not as much fun. The press has been taken in by Clinton. And by the amalgamation of politics. Nobody denies that the parties are more alike than they are different. No, the press has failed, failed utterly -- they've turned into slovenly rotters. Particularly The New York Times, which has come to be a bastion of political correctness. I think my place in history as defined by the PC people would be pretty radically wrong. Maybe I could be set up as a target at the other end of the spectrum. I feel more out of place now than I did under Nixon. Yeah, that's weird. There's something going on here, Mr. Jones, and you don't know what it is, do you? Yeah, Clinton has been a much more successfully deviant president than Nixon was. You can bet if the stock market fell to 4,000 and if four million people lost their jobs there'd be a lot of hell to pay, but so what? He's already re-elected. Democracy as a system has evolved into something that Thomas Jefferson didn't anticipate. Or maybe he did, at the end of his life. He got very bitter about the press. And what is it he said? "I tremble for my nation when I reflect that God is just"? That's a guy who's seen the darker side. Yeah, we've become a nation of swine. - HST - The Atlantic , August 26, 1997

TV news is quite probably the most superficial form of journalism ever invented. Hunter Thompson characterized it fifty years ago as a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men go to die.

Watch your language! You're talking to a doctor of journalism!

I can't think in terms of journalism without thinking in terms of political ends. Unless there's been a reaction, there's been no journalism. It is cause and effect. —Hunter S. Thompson

We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of true romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely—at least, not all the time—but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness. —Hunter S. Thompson

I was not proud of what I had learned, but I never doubted that it was worth knowing.