Archive

Quotes

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

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

There are two things that will be believed of any man whatsoever, and one of them is that he has taken to drink.

—Booth Tarkington, 1914

My advice to people today is as follows: if you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out.

—Timothy Leary, 1966

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

—Geoffrey Chaucer, c. 1390

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

A true German can’t stand the French, / Yet willingly he drinks their wines.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1832

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

—Gore Vidal, 1981

Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

—Herman Melville, 1851

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

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

—Ambrose Bierce, 1906

The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we’d get into that rotten stuff pretty soon. Probably at the next gas station.

—Hunter S. Thompson, 1971

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

—Samuel Johnson, 1779