Quotes on Alcoholism

it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance

Trying to describe the process of becoming an alcoholic is like trying to describe air. It's too big and mysterious and pervasive to be defined. Alcohol is everywhere in your life, omnipresent, and you're both aware and unaware of it almost all the time, all you know is you'd die without it, and there is no simple reason why this happens, no single moment, no physiological event that pushes a heavy drinker across a concrete line into alcoholism. It's a slow, gradual, insidious, elusive becoming.

There is this to be said in favor of drinking, that it takes the drunkard first out of society, then out of the world.

I like to do my principal research in bars, where people are more likely to tell the truth or, at least, lie less convincingly than they do in briefings and books.

I believe, if we take habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class. There seems ever to have been a proneness in the brilliant and warm-blooded to fall into this vice.

Drink! for you know not when you came, nor why; Drink! for you know not why you go, nor where.

I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered.

One reason I don't drink is that I want to know when I am having a good time.

Because of social pressure, individualism is rejected by most people in favor of conformity. Thus the individual relies mainly upon the actions of others and neglects the meaning of his own personal life. Hence he sees his own life as meaningless and falls into the “existential vacuum” feeling inner void. Progressive automation causes increasing alcoholism, juvenile delinquency, and suicide.

Children are coming to school with trauma, everyday trauma, that they live under: violence in the homes, alcoholism in the community, unemployment thats 80 percent, not just during the recession. We need to help treat that before they can even go sit in a class and learn about math.

Drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness.

Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.

Alcohol doesn't console, it doesn't fill up anyone's psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God. It doesn't comfort man. On the contrary, it encourages him in his folly, it transports him to the supreme regions where he is master of his own destiny.

You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.

It takes only one drink to get me drunk. The trouble is, I can't remember if it's the thirteenth or the fourteenth.

If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.

I grew up in traditional black patriarchal culture and there is no doubt that I’m going to take a great many unconscious, but present, patriarchal complicities to the grave because it so deeply ensconced in how I look at the world. Therefore, very much like alcoholism, drug addiction, or racism patriarchy is a disease and we are in perennial recovery and relapse. So you have to get up every morning and struggle against it.

Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter, sermons and soda water the day after.

A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.

One drink is to many for me and a thousand not enough.

Macduff: What three things does drink especially provoke? Porter: Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and urine.