Quotations and Poems

» “If all be true that I do think, there are five reasons we should drink: Good wine — a friend — or being dry — or lest we should be by and by — or any other reason why.”
– Henry Aldrich

»  ”One reason I don’t drink is that I want to know when I am having a good time.”
– Lady Nancy Astor

»  ”An alcoholic has been lightly defined as a man who drinks more than his own doctor.”
– Alvan L. Barach

»  ”The best audience is one that is intelligent, well-educated, and a little drunk.”
– Alben W. Barkley

»  ”Other countries drink to get drunk, and this is accepted by everyone; in France, drunkenness is a consequence, never an intention. A drink is felt as the spinning out of a pleasure, not as the necessary cause of an effect which is sought: wine is not only a philter, it is also the leisurely act of drinking.”
– Roland Barthes

»  ”One drink is too many for me and a thousand not enough.”
– Brendan F. Behan

»  ”Wine is a mocker, and strong drink is raging; and who is deceived by it is not wise.”
– Bible

»  ”The whole world is about three drinks behind.”
– Humphrey Bogart

»  ”Never accept a drink from a Urologist.”
– Erma Bombeck

»  ”Wine is a treacherous friend who you must always be on guard for.”
– Christian Nevell Bovee

»  ”The decline of the aperitif may well be one of the most depressing phenomena of our time.”
– Luis Bunuel

»  ”When I played drunks I had to remain sober because I didn’t know how to play them when I was drunk.”
– Sir Richard Burton

»  ”It is immoral to get drunk because the headache comes after the drinking, but if the headache came first and the drunkenness afterwards, it would be moral to get drunk.”
– Samuel Butler

»  ”Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter. Sermons and soda water the day after.”
– Lord Byron

»  ”Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; the best of life is but intoxication.”
– Lord Byron

»  ”Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.”
– Raymond Chandler

»  ”Most Americans are born drunk, and really require a little wine or beer to sober them. They have a sort of permanent intoxication from within, a sort of invisible champagne. Americans do not need to drink to inspire them to do anything, though they do sometimes, I think, need a little for the deeper and more delicate purpose of teaching them how to do nothing.”
– Gilbert K. Chesterton

»  ”I have been brought up and trained to have the utmost contempt for people who get drunk.”
– Winston Churchill

»  ”I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.”
– Winston Churchill

»  ”A sudden violent jolt of it has been known to stop the victim’s watch, snap his suspenders and crack his glass eye right across.”
– Irvin S. Cobb

»  ”Some men are like musical glasses; to produce their finest tones you must keep them wet.”
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge

»  ”There is only one really safe, mild, harmless beverage and you can drink as much of that as you like without running the slightest risk, and what you say when you want it is, ”Garcon! Un Pernod!””
– Aleister Crowley

»  ”Bring in the bottled lightning, a clean tumbler, and a corkscrew.”
– Charles Dickens

»  ”Alcohol is necessary for a man so that he can have a good opinion of himself, undisturbed be the facts.”
– Finley Peter Dunne

»  ”Alcohol is barren. The words a man speaks in the night of drunkenness fade like the darkness itself at the coming of day.”
– Marguerite Duras

»  ”When a woman drinks it’s as if an animal were drinking, or a child. Alcoholism is scandalous in a woman, and a female alcoholic is rare, a serious matter. It’s a slur on the divine in our nature.”
– Marguerite Duras

»  ”No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book or painting can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation.”
– Marguerite Duras

»  ”There is this to be said in favor of drinking, that it takes the drunkard first out of society, then out of the world.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

»  ”He is a drunkard who takes more than three glasses though he be not drunk.”
– Epictetus

»  ”I have fed purely upon ale; I have eat my ale, drank my ale, and I always sleep upon ale.”
– George Farquhar

»  ”Wine is a turncoat; first a friend and then an enemy.”
– Henry Fielding

»  ”I never drink water. I’m afraid it will become habit-forming.”
– W. C. Fields

»  ”I never drink water; that is the stuff that rusts pipes.”
– W. C. Fields

»  ”It was a woman who drove me to drink, and I never had the courtesy to thank her for it.”
– W. C. Fields

»  ”Somebody left the cork out of my lunch.”
– W. C. Fields

»  ”The cost of living has gone up another dollar a quart.”
– W. C. Fields

»  ”You can’t trust water: Even a straight stick turns crooked in it.”
– W. C. Fields

»  ”Wine hath drowned more men than the sea.”
– Thomas Fuller

»  ”A drinker has a hole under his nose that all his money runs into.”
– Thomas Fuller

»  ”Fill it up. I take as large draughts of liquor as I did of love. I hate a flincher in either.”
– John Gay

»  ”I can’t say whether we had more wit among us now than usual, but I am certain we had more laughing, which answered the end as well.”
– Oliver Goldsmith

»  ”I’m tied of hearing about temperance instead of abstinence, in order to please the cocktail crowd in church congregations.”
– Vance Havner

»  ”I’m tired of hearing sin called sickness and alcoholism a disease. It is the only disease I know of that we’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to spread.”
– Vance Havner

»  ”Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.”
– Ernest Hemingway

»  ”Don’t you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky? When you are cold and wet what else can warm you? Before an attack who can say anything that gives you the momentary well-being that rum does? The only time it isn’t good for you is when you write or when you fight. You have to do that cold. But it always helps my shooting. Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.”
– Ernest Hemingway

»  ”Drink not the third glass, which thou canst not tame, when once it is within thee.”
– George Herbert

»  ”Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink for fellows whom it hurts to think.”
– A. E. Housman

»  ”Malt does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man.”
– A. E. Housman

»  ”They who drink beer will think beer.”
– Washington Irving

»  ”If merely ”feeling good” could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.”
– William James

»  ”The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes.”
– William James

»  ”There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.”
– Samuel Johnson

»  ”There are some sluggish men who are improved by drinking; as there are fruits that are not good until they are rotten.”
– Samuel Johnson

»  ”A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated, has not the art of getting drunk.”
– Samuel Johnson

»  ”Even though a number of people have tried, no one has ever found a way to drink for a living.”
– Jean Kerr

»  ”Drink! for you know not whence you came nor why: drink! for you know not why you go, nor where.”
– Omar Khayyam

»  ”There is a devil in every berry of the grape.”
– The Koran

»  ”A few years back I was more a candidate for skid row bum than an Emmy. If I hadn’t stopped [drinking], I’d be playing handball with John Belushi right now.”
– John Larroquette

»  ”My experience through life has convinced me that, while moderation and temperance in all things are commendable and beneficial, abstinence from spirituous liquors is the best safeguard of morals and health.”
– Robert E. Lee

»  ”I like whiskey. I always did, and that is why I never drink it.”
– Robert E. Lee

»  ”It pays to get drunk with the best people.”
– Joe E. Lewis

»  ”I would take a bomb, but I can’t stand the noise.”
– Joe E. Lewis

»  ”I drink to forget I drink.”
– Joe E. Lewis

»  ”I don’t drink any more than the man next to me, and the man next to me is Dean Martin.”
– Joe E. Lewis

»  ”A man is never drunk if he can lay on the floor without holding on.”
– Joe E. Lewis

»  ”I always wake up at the crack of ice.”
– Joe E. Lewis

»  ”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.”
– Abraham Lincoln

»  ”I’d hate to be a teetotaler. Imagine getting up in the morning and knowing that’s as good as you’re going to feel all day.”
– Dean Martin

»  ”If you drink, don’t drive. Don’t even putt.”
– Dean Martin

»  ”Prohibition may be a disputed theory, but none can say that it doesn’t hold water.”
– Thomas L. Masson

»  ”A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn’t care to drink with, even if he drank.”
– H. L. Mencken

»  ”And when night, darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.”
– John Milton

»  ”Candy, is dandy, but Liquor, is quicker.”
– Ogden Nash

»  ”I only drink to make other people seem more interesting.”
– George Jean Nathan

»  ”The Great Spirit, who made all things, made every thing for some use, and whatever use he designed anything for, that use it should always be put to. Now, when he made rum, he said ”Let this be for the Indians to get drunk with,” and it must be so.”
– Native American Elder

»  ”Where does one not find that bland degeneration which beer produces in the spirit!”
– Friedrich Nietzsche

»  ”For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche

»  ”A torchlight procession marching down your throat.”
– John Louis O’Sullivan

»  ”Thanks be to God. Since my leaving the drinking of wine, I do find myself much better, and do mind my business better, and do spend less money, and less time lost in idle company.”
– Samuel Pepys

»  ”This is the great fault of wine; it first trips up the feet: it is a cunning wrestler.”
– Titus Maccius Plautus

»  ”What whiskey will not cure, there is no cure for.”
– Irish Proverb

»  ”Old wine and friends improve with age.”
– Italian Proverb

»  ”Under a tattered cloak you will generally find a good drinker.”
– Spanish Proverb

»  ”When I drink, I think; and when I think, I drink.”
– Fran