The drunken man is a living corpse.

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.

I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too.

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

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

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

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

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

That which the sober man keeps in his breast, the drunken man lets out at the lips. Astute people, when they want to ascertain a man’s true character, make him drunk.

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.

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

To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation.

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.