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Quotes

I mean, why on earth (outside sickness and hangovers) aren’t people continually drunk? I want ecstasy of the mind all the time.

—Jack Kerouac, 1957

Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

—Herman Melville, 1851

People who’ve drunk neat wine don’t care a damn.

—Hipponax, c. 550 BC

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

Drink today and drown all sorrow; / You shall perhaps not do it tomorrow.

—John Fletcher, 1625

There was a great deal of drinking among us but little drunkenness. We all seemed to feel that Prohibition was a personal affront and that we had a moral duty to undermine it.

—Elizabeth Anderson, 1969

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

Abstainer, n. A weak man who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.

—Ambrose Bierce, 1906

Sex and drugs and rock and roll.

—Ian Dury, 1977

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

Drinking with women is as unnatural as scolding with ’em.

—William Wycherley, 1675