Hunter S. Thompson Quotes

When I was on acid, I would see things like beams of light and I would hear sounds that sounded an awful lot like car horns.

Hallucinations are bad enough. But after awhile you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing. But nobody can handle that other trip-the possibility that any freak with $1.98 can walk into the Circus-Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs.

If you've never seen an elephant ski, you've never been on acid.

We have developed this unbelievable ability to deny. We have to. If we didn't, we'd go crazy.

It is true that when you smoke DMT, for example, at a sufficiently high and prepared dose, you get elves, everybody does. All you need do, is inhale deeply three times, and you know... You want contact? You want elves? You want alien contact? You'll have that!

If you sit down with a person, or a watermelon for that matter, when you're stoned and sing into it, the quality of the hallucination is such that there is a way of thinking about it where you could say, 'This is an acoustical hologram of the interior of their body.'" I don't say that.I just say, "My goodness isn't it strange that I seem to be able to see inside of the watermelon when I'm doing this.'

I suddenly became strangely inebriated. The external world became changed as in a dream. Objects appeared to gain in relief; they assumed unusual dimensions; and colors became more glowing. Even self-perception and the sense of time were changed. When the eyes were closed, colored pictures flashed past in a quickly changing kaleidoscope. After a few hours, the not unpleasant inebriation, which had been experienced whilst I was fully conscious, disappeared. What had caused this condition?

The Beatles had gone beyond comprehension. We were smoking marijuana for breakfast. We were well into marijuana and nobody could communicate with us, because we were just glazed eyes, giggling all the time.

I've tried it long ago, with hashish and peyote. Fascinating, yes, but no good, no. This, as we find in alcohol, is an escape from awareness, a cheat, a momentary substitution, and in the end a destruction of it.

Everybody should wish they had home movies of themselves, acting out their lunacy on LSD.

I've never met anybody who's had a flashback in my life and I took millions of trips in the Sixties, and I've never met anybody who had any problem. I've had bad trips, but I've had bad trips in real life. I've had a bad trip on a joint. I can get paranoid just sitting in a restaurant; I don't have to take anything.

No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.

Ordinarily it would take me about fifteen minutes to get a hallucination going," wrote Feynman, "but on a few occasions, when I smoked some marijuana beforehand, it came very quickly.

You can't ever stop thinking something quick enough. Something that hurts always gets the knife in too fast for you to slam a lid on it and shove it away.

What people notice about [when they are on] LSD is either what's right or wrong with themselves or how freaky the world is.

DMT was a gaseous wax that you could smoke that gave you a 20-minute psychedelic high. You'd inhale it. And then when you'd exhale—poof, you'd be high. I saw Buddha, man. I know that sounds like no big deal. But I saw a gigantic holographic Buddha — correct in every way! Buddhas can be very intricate — these drawings that you see in books. Thousands of details were included in this Buddha. Where did they come from? I didn't make them up. I can't even draw, you know? I could barely spell cat, you know? And there it was. And I thought, Wow — the power of the mind, you know?

Do you think it's possible that when we're on something like marijuana or mushrooms and we believe we're having a really spiritual experience that we're just high?

Did you ever consider that LSD was really one of the most dangerous drugs ever manufactured because the people who took it turned into yuppies?

I wanted to make a film that gave the people who took LSD at that time the hallucinations that you get with that drug, but without hallucinating.

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

And then, just when you think that you have experienced all the wonders that this world has to offer, you round a peak and suddenly think you're doing the whole thing over again, but this time on drugs.

The psychedelic mind is a higher dimensional mind, it is not fit for three dimensional space time.

We can't sell short the spiritual power of cannabis, especially when eaten.

LSD was my "wonder child", we had a positive reaction from everywhere in the world. Around two thousand publications about it appeared in scientific journals and everything was fine. Then, at the beginning of the 1960s, here in the United States, LSD became a drug of abuse. In a short time, this wave of popular use swept the country and it became "drug number one". It was then used without caution and people were not prepared and informed about its deep effects. Instead of a "wonder child", LSD suddenly became my "problem child".

Then there was LSD, which was supposed to make you think you could fly. I remember it made you think you couldn't stand up, and mostly it was right.