Archive

Quotes

As far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience of intoxification.

—Will Self, 1994

Life isn’t all beer and skittles, but beer and skittles, or something better of the same sort, must form a good part of every Englishman’s education.

—Thomas Hughes, 1857

Drink does not drown care but waters it, and makes it grow faster.

—Benjamin Franklin, 1749

A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated has not the art of getting drunk.

—Samuel Johnson, 1779

Modern life is often a mechanical oppression, and liquor is the only mechanical relief.

—Ernest Hemingway, 1935

Drunkenness is the very sepulcher / Of man’s wit and his discretion.

—Geoffrey Chaucer, c. 1390

Sex and drugs and rock and roll.

—Ian Dury, 1977

Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, men have at all times and in all countries, called in some physical aid to their moral consolations—wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco.

—Edmund Burke, 1795

I have sometimes thought that the laws ought not to punish those actions of evil which are committed when the senses are steeped in intoxication.

—Walt Whitman, 1842

Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need—a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.

—Jerome K. Jerome, 1889

As he brews, so shall he drink.

—Ben Jonson, 1598

Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

—Herman Melville, 1851

Drugs, cataplasms, and whiskey are stupid substitutes for the dignity and potency of divine mind and its efficacy to heal.

—Mary Baker Eddy, 1908