Biographile’s This Week in History remembers events of the past, and the icons that set them in motion. If the below isn't enough for you, read more inspiring author quotes.

On July 18, 1937, Hunter S. Thompson, author and journalist, was born in Louisville, Kentucky. Though his career as a journalist spanned decades and a variety of subjects -- from sports to politics -- Thompson is perhaps best known as the author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a vivid and brutally honest account of a drug-and-alcohol-soaked weekend road trip told in his iconic style: the manic, first-person narration that embodied his pioneering Gonzo journalism.

This style of journalistic writing, which Thompson introduced with his first book, Hell's Angels, openly casts off any attempt to be objective, instead opting to place the writer in the story as something closer to a character. In shedding objectivity, one of the restrictions inherent to journalism, Thompson was able to cover stories that were too fantastical or too intense to fit into the traditional journalistic model because they usually could not be easily verified. And by placing himself and often his personal flaws into the center of his stories, he was able to introduce stories of those on society's fringes, like the Hells Angels, to fairly mainstream audiences, and the gritty, often graphic, result made him an icon of American counterculture.

So to honor Thompson's birthday, instead of our usual offering of inspirational or aspirational quotes, we're staying true to his style: There are no fairy tales here and no idyllic phrases. Instead, we've collected a handful of words that best illustrate the voice he embodied, the voice that Hari Kunzru called "that of American moralist ... one who often makes himself ugly to expose the ugliness he sees around him." Like Thompson himself, they may seem harsh, extreme, or simply offbeat, but they carry a beauty and an inspirational quality all their own.

1. "Very few toads in this world are Prince Charmings in disguise." (Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, 1966)

2. "This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable." (Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72, 1973)

3. "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." (Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, 1966)

4. "In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone." (Rolling Stone, 1976)

5. "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." ("Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl" Rolling Stone, 1974)

6. "Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of 'the rat race' is not yet final." (Gonzo Papers, Vol. 1: The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time, 1979)

7. "A man who has blown all his options can't afford the luxury of changing his ways. He has to capitalize on whatever he has left, and he can't afford to admit — no matter how often he's reminded of it — that every day of his life takes him farther and farther down a blind alley." (Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, 1966)

8. "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." (Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72, 1973)

9. "I went to the Democratic Convention as a journalist, and returned a raving beast. For me, that week in Chicago was far worse than the worst bad acid trip I'd even heard rumors about. It permanently altered my brain chemistry." (Comment on 1968 Democratic National Convention, Qtd "The Doctor Is In" The Boston Globe Magazine, 1988)

10. "Not everybody is comfortable with the idea that politics is a guilty addiction. But it is. They are addicts, and they are guilty and they do lie and cheat and steal — like all junkies. And when they get in a frenzy, they will sacrifice anything and anybody to feed their cruel and stupid habit, and there is no cure for it. That is addictive thinking. That is politics — especially in presidential campaigns. That is when the addicts seize the high ground. They care about nothing else. They are salmon, and they must spawn. They are addicts." (Better than Sex, 1994)

11. "The importance of Liking Yourself is a notion that fell heavily out of favour during the coptic, anti-ego frenzy of the acid era — but nobody guessed back then that the experiment might churn up this kind of hangover; a whole subculture of frightened illiterates with no faith in anything." (Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72, 1973)

12. "Frankly, I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left me." (Letter to Arch Gerhart, 1958)