ALCOHOL AND ALCOHOLISM

I told you, sir, they were red-hot with drinking; so full of valor that they smote the air, for breathing in their faces, beat the ground for kissing of their feet.
William Shakespeare

I drink to make other people interesting.
Source Unknown

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

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

Wine is bottled poetry.
Robert Louis Stevenson

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

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

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

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

I'm not so think as you drunk I am.
John Squire

The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.
William Butler Yeats

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

If I remember right there are five excuses for drinking: the visit of a guest, present thirst, future thirst, the goodness of the wine, and any other excuse you choose!
Pete Sermond

Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink for fellows whom it hurts to think.
A. E. Housman

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

What whiskey will not cure, there is no cure for.
Irish Proverbs

Old wine and friends improve with age.
Italian Proverbs

I'm only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler.
George Bernard Shaw

Under a tattered cloak you will generally find a good drinker.
Spanish Proverbs

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

Macduff: What three things does drink especially provoke? Porter: Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and urine.
William Shakespeare

And must I wholly banish hence these red and golden juices, and pay my vows to Abstinence, that pallidest of Muses?
Sir William Watson

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

It's a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don't see or care.
Source Unknown

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

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

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

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

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

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

They make much of our drinking, but never think of our thirst.
L. Schefer

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

I never drink water. I'm afraid it will become habit-forming.
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

No power on earth or above the bottomless pit has such influence to terrorize and make cowards of men as the liquor power. Satan could not have fallen on a more potent instrument with which to thrall the world. Alcohol is king!
Eliza ''Mother'' Stewart

It takes that je ne sais quoi which we call sophistication for a woman to be magnificent in a drawing-room when her faculties have departed but she herself has not yet gone home.
James Thurber

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

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

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

Malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man.
A. E. Housman

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

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

It provokes the desire but it takes away the performance. Therefore much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery: it makes him and it mars him; it sets him on and it takes him off.
William Shakespeare

At the punch-bowl's brink, let the thirsty think, what they say in Japan: first the man takes a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes the man!
Edward Rowland Sill

You can't trust water: Even a straight stick turns crooked in it.
W. C. Fields

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

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

I would take a bomb, but I can't stand the noise.
Joe E. Lewis

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