HST, or Dr. Gonzo, would have turned 75 on July 18, 2012. Thanks to his prolific career as a columnist, reporter, author and media darling, his words live on.

Here he is as the anti-Big Brother, pro-libertarian, pro-gun, liberal kook that made him a national treasure from the late sixties until his suicide in 2005.

By Brian Fairbanks.

"John F. Kennedy [was] murdered in Dallas by some hapless geek named Oswald who worked for either Castro, the mob, Jimmy Hoffa, the CIA, his dominatrix landlady or the odious, degenerate FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. The list is long and crazy -- maybe Marilyn Monroe's first husband fired those shots from the grassy knoll. Who knows?"

"I've found you can deal with the system a lot easier if you use their rules by understanding their rules, by using their rules against them. I talk to a lot of lawyers."

"The PATRIOT Act was a dagger in the heart, really, of even the concept of a democratic government that is free, equal and just.

"There are a lot more concentration camps right now than Guantanamo Bay. But they're not marked."

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

"I went to the Democratic Convention as a journalist, and returned a cold-blooded revolutionary."

"I think a lot of people in this country agree with me -- a lot more than that are saying anything. We'll see what happens to me if I get my head cut off next week -- it is always unknown or bushy-haired strangers who commit suicide right afterwards with no witnesses."

"He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time."

"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."

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

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

"There was one exact moment, in fact, when I knew for sure that Al Gore would never be President of the United States, no matter what the experts were saying -- and that was when the whole Bush family suddenly appeared on TV and openly scoffed at the idea of Gore winning Florida. The old man was the real tip-off. The leer on his face was almost frightening. It was like looking into the eyes of a tall hyena with a living sheep in its mouth. The sheep's fate was sealed, and so was Al Gore's."

"All we have to do is get out and vote, while it's still legal, and we will wash those crooked warmongers out of the White House."

"[Voting] ain't much, but it's the only weapon we have against the Greedheads."

"Every GOP administration since 1952 has let the Military-Industrial Complex loot the Treasury and plunge the nation into debt on the excuse of a wartime economic emergency."

"[T]his blizzard of mind-warping war propaganda out of Washington is building up steam. Monday is Anthrax, Tuesday is Bankruptcy, Friday is Child-Rape, Thursday is Bomb-scares, etc., etc., etc.... If we believed all the brutal, frat-boy threats coming out of the White House, we would be dead before Sunday."

"The slow-rising central horror of Watergate is not that it might grind down to the reluctant impeachment of a vengeful thug of a president whose entire political career has been a monument to the same kind of cheap shots and treachery he finally got nailed for, but that we might somehow fail to learn something from it."

"Paranoia is just another word for ignorance."

"The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now with somebody and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives."

"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."