Alcoholism Quotes

1. "The Whites have carried to these (colonial) people the worst that they could carry: the plagues of the world: materialism, fanaticism, alcoholism, and syphilis. Moreover, since what these people possessed on their own was superior to anything we could give them, they have remained themselves... The sole result of the activity of the colonizers is: they have everywhere aroused hatred."
Author: Adolf Hitler

2. "By the time I was eighteen, she had sat me down and detailed her alcoholism, its onset and aftermath. She believed that by sharing such things I might be able to avoid them or, if need be, recognize them when they occurred. By talking about them to her children, she was also acknowledging that they were real and that they had an effect on us too, that things like this shaped a family, not just the person they happened to."
Author: Alice Sebold

3. "He has always been a silent gargoyle sitting at the head of our family table. I've pieced together his story from what little my relatives have shared in hushed disclosures and from reading other soldiers' biographies, visiting museums, and watching the documentary channel. I've adopted historic facts collected by experts and academics as my heritage. I've learned about my grandfather the way many of us (Generation Xers) learn about their elders, whose voices have been muted by dissociation, depression, alcoholism, trauma, and denial."
Author: Amber Dawn

4. "People with family histories of alcoholism tend to have lower levels of endorphins- the endogenous morphine that is responsible for many of our pleasure responses- than do people genetically disinclined to alcoholism. Alcohol will slightly raise the endorphin level of people without the genetic basis for alcoholism; it will dramatically raise the endorphin level of people with that genetic basis. Specialists spend a lot of time formulating exotic hypotheses to account for substance abuse. Most experts point out, strong motivations for avoiding drugs; but there are also strong motivations for taking them. People who claim not to understand why anyone would get addicted to drugs are usually people who haven't tried them or who are genetically fairly invulnerable to them."
Author: Andrew Solomon

5. "I also became aware at about this time that our political culture could be described as an addictive system. The signs were identical to those of alcoholism, only on a far larger scale. This terrified me. I knew how unclear an addict's mind & thinking became; I hated to think that the same addictive thinking might underlie the decisions made for our nation."
Author: Anne Wilson Schaef

6. "The reason the program is so successful is because alcoholics help other alcoholics. I've never met a Normie (our lingo for a person who doesn't have a problem with drugs and alcohol) who could even conceive of what it's like to be an alcoholic. Normies are always going, 'There's this new pill you can take and you won't want to shoot heroin anymore.' That shows a fundamental misunderstanding of alcoholism and drug addiction. These aren't just physical allergies, they're obsessions of the mind and maladies of the spirit. It's a threefold disease. And if it's partly a spiritual malady, then there's a spiritual cure."
Author: Anthony Kiedis

7. "'Master Harold' is about me as a little boy, and my father, who was an alcoholic. There's a thread running down the Fugard line of alcoholism. Thankfully I haven't passed it on to my child, a wonderful daughter who's stone-cold sober. But I had the tendency from my father, just as he had had it from his father."
Author: Athol Fugard

8. "The poor spend all their free time drinking. It helps cope with the terrible drudgery of obtaining food stamps. An ethic of alcoholism prevails among the upper class too, but they use leisure to deal with it."
Author: Bauvard

9. "What Friedan gave to the world was, "the problem that has no name." She not only named it but dissected it. The advances of science, the development of labor-saving appliances, the development of the suburbs: all had come together to offer women in the 1950s a life their mothers had scarcely dreamed of, free from rampant disease, onerous drudgery, noxious city streets. But the green lawns and big corner lots were isolating, the housework seemed to expand to fill the time available, and polio and smallpox were replaced by depression and alcoholism. All that was covered up in a kitchen conspiracy of denial...[i]nstead the problem was with the mystique of waxed floors and perfectly applied lipstick."
Author: Betty Friedan

10. "My loss of faith in God had, after all, neatly coincided with the beginning of my drug use when I was 15. Perhaps this could be the means by which I restored myself in the sight of God and the world. Besides which, I had often heard how the only other people who recovered from alcoholism were those who recovered through the churches. AA didn't seem to be all there. I had to take it deeper, disregarding the intellect entirely."
Author: Carl John X. Veraja

11. "It is facile to imply that smoking, alcoholism, overeating, or other ingrained patters can be upended without real effort. Genuine change requires work and self-understanding of the cravings driving behaviours."
Author: Charles Duhigg

12. "Alcoholism, of course, is more than a habit. It's a physical addiction with psychological and perhaps genetic roots."
Author: Charles Duhigg

13. "I became a very angry person and it was all due to alcoholism."
Author: Christopher Atkins

14. "Scientists announced that they have located the gene for alcoholism. Scientists say they found it at a party, talking way too loudly."
Author: Conan O'Brien

15. "I grew up in traditional black patriarchal culture and there is no doubt that I'm going to take a great many unconscious, but present, patriarchal complicities to the grave because it so deeply ensconced in how I look at the world. Therefore, very much like alcoholism, drug addiction, or racism patriarchy is a disease and we are in perennial recovery and relapse. So you have to get up every morning and struggle against it."
Author: Cornel West

16. "Whether I or anyone else accepted the concept of alcoholism as a disease didn't matter; what mattered was that when treated as a disease, those who suffered from it were most likely to recover."
Author: Craig Ferguson

17. "Alcohol ruined me financially and morally, broke my heart and the hearts of too many others. Even though it did this to me and it almost killed me and I haven't touched a drop of it in seventeen years, sometimes I wonder if I could get away with drinking some now. I totally subscribe to the notion that alcoholism is a mental illness because thinking like that is clearly insane."
Author: Craig Ferguson

18. "Dr. Jeckyll & Mr. Hyde is a metaphor for alcoholism. He drinks a potion, becomes a monster. I know exactly how he feels."
Author: Craig Ferguson

19. "Alcoholism is a choice... not a life sentence."
Author: David Norman

20. "Children are coming to school with trauma, everyday trauma, that they live under: violence in the homes, alcoholism in the community, unemployment that's 80 percent, not just during the recession. We need to help treat that before they can even go sit in a class and learn about math."
Author: Denise Juneau

21. "This book (Jarod Kintz's book) is trash. I mean, I assume it is, because that's where I found it while scrounging for lunch. However, I must admit that I haven't read it. I would have, but I am homeless, mainly due to my illiteracy (though Big Government, Keynesian monetary policy, and my struggle with alcoholism certainly played a large role)."
Author: Dora J. Arod

22. "Walk the Bowery under the El at night and all you feel is a sort of cold guilt. Touched for a dime, you try to drop the coin and not touch the hand, because the hand is dirty; you try to avoid the glance, because the glance accuses. This is not so much personal menace as universal — the cold menace of unresolved human suffering and poverty and the advanced stages of the disease alcoholism."
Author: E.B. White

23. "Lucy preferred gin and tonics during the summer and switched over to whiskey sours in the winter. At dinner, a sit-down affair with the family, Lucy drank whatever the Temerlins drank, including expensive French wines. "She never gets obnoxious, even when smashed to the brink of unconsciousness," wrote Maurice, revealing more about the chimp's alcoholism than perhaps he intended. At one point, he tried to wean Lucy off the good stuff and onto Boone's Farm apple wine. Assuming she would delight in the fruity swill, he purchased a case and filled her glass one night at dinner. Lucy took a sip of the apple wine, noticed her parents were drinking something else, and put her glass down. She then graabbed Maurice's glass of Chablis and polished it off. She finished Jane's next. Not another sip of Boone's farm ever touched her lips."
Author: Elizabeth Hess

24. "Alcoholism is a Curse"
Author: Honeya

25. "Alcoholism or addiction is a disease because it fits the definition of disease. It is progressive and chronic, and left untreated, it will kill."
Author: Irene Tomkinson

26. "One Saturday in 1984, I walked into my first AA meeting. I went regularly for six years and only stopped when I came to realize my underlying problem was not genuine alcoholism, but depression."
Author: Jack Dee

27. "Donald Lydecker: Alcoholism is not a disease, it's a failing. You've turned it into a church. You worship the altar of self-pity. I come to these rooms for one reason, to remember what I don't want to become... helpless, impotent, and weak."
Author: James Cameron

28. "Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair."
Author: Jeffrey Eugenides

29. "America today is a "save yourself" society if there ever was one. But does it really work? The underdeveloped societies suffer from one set of diseases: tuberculosis, malnutrition, pneumonia, parasites, typhoid, cholera, typhus, etc. Affluent America has virtually invented a whole new set of diseases: obesity, arteriosclerosis, heart disease, strokes, lung cancer, venereal disease, cirrhosis of the liver, drug addiction, alcoholism, divorce, battered children, suicide, murder. Take your choice. Labor-saving machines have turned out to be body-killing devices. Our affluence has allowed both mobility and isolation of the nuclear family, and as a result, our divorce courts, our prisons and our mental institutions are flooded. In saving ourselves we have nearly lost ourselves."
Author: John Piper

30. "There is no fact, no detail of our life too sordid for God's intervention. God has seen murder. God has seen rape. God has seen drug addiction's and alcoholism's utter degradation. God is available to us no matter what our circumstances. God can find us in a crack house. God can find us crumpled in a doorway or cowering on a park bench. We need only reach out to discover that God reaches back. We are led a step at a time even when we feel we are alone. Sometimes God talks to us through people. Sometimes God reaches us through circumstances or coincidence. God has a million ways to reach out to us, and when we are open to it, we begin to sense the touch of God coming to us from all directions."
Author: Julia Cameron

31. "Most memoirs about alcoholism, promiscuity, and addiction are deep, sobering tales full of scars that will never heal and include alarming statistics and reflection about recovery.This is not one of those memoirs."
Author: Kate Madison

32. "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."
Author: Marguerite Duras

33. "I'd never played a cop before, and this particular role with what she is going thru, especially during the first season, covering her alcoholism to her on the job performance, was a great opportunity for me as an actress."
Author: Nancy McKeon

34. "Father Dmitry had thought he had been serving his nation by spreading trust, and fighting abortion and despair, but, in doing so, he was defying the state. And that was not allowed. That was why he had to be crushed. His fate parallels the fate of his whole nation. Through the twentieth century, the government in Moscow taught the Russians that hope and trust are dangerous, inimical and treacherous. That is the root of the social breakdown that has caused the epidemic of alcoholism, the collapsing birth rate, the crime and the misery."
Author: Oliver Bullough

35. "My mother is still battling alcoholism."
Author: Patrick J. Kennedy

36. "Religion became an end, rather than a means, a substitute for God. Until alcoholism intervened and forced the issue: God, or religion? – p. 125"
Author: Ray A.

37. "Not only did God deliver me from the bondage of alcoholism, he also blessed my family financially because of my commitment to honor what he had done for me and for not doing what I believed could possibly be destructive to others."
Author: Richard Kiel

38. "The worst disease which can afflict executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it's egotism."
Author: Robert Frost

39. "There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers - encouraging them to die."
Author: Sharon Olds

40. "The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil."
Author: Simone Weil

41. "Lying is like alcoholism. You are always recovering."
Author: Steven Soderbergh

42. "Depression is about anger, it is about anxiety, it is about character and heredity. But it is also about something that is in its way quite unique. It is the illness of identity, it is the illness of those who do not know where they fit, who lose faith in the myths they have so painstakenly created for themselves. [...] It is a plague - especially if you add in its various forms of expression, like alcoholism, anorexia, bulimia, drug addiction, compulsive behaviour of one kind or another. They're all the same things: attempts to avoid disappearance, or nothingness, or chaos."
Author: Tim Lott

43. "Alcoholism is an imperfect spiritual longing."
Author: Tom Robbins

44. "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."
Author: Vance Havner

45. "Explain to me, if you will, why alcoholism is a disease but can only be treated by attending little spiritual meetings in basements."
Author: Vicki Covington

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