Drink

This entry should contain ONLY quotes about alcohol in general; quotes about beer or wine specifically should go in those respective entries.
An alcoholic beverage is a drink containing ethanol, commonly known as alcohol — although in chemistry the definition of alcohol includes many other compounds. Alcoholic beverages are divided into three general classes: beers, wines, and spirits.

Sourced

• Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning, that they may follow strong drink; that continue until night, till wine inflame them!
  • The Bible (KJV), Isaiah 5:11

• There's nought, no doubt, so much the spirit calms as rum and true religion.
  • Lord Byron, Don Juan, Second Canto

• Oh many a peer of England brews
  Livelier liquor than the Muse,
  And malt does more than Milton can
  To justify God's ways to man.
  • A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad, LXII (1896)

• Every inordinate cup is unbless'd, and the ingredient is a devil.
  • William Shakespeare, Othello, Act II Scene III

Unsourced

• All excess is ill, but drunkenness is of the worst sort. It spoils health, dismounts the mind, and unmans men. It reveals secrets, is quarrelsome, lascivious, impudent, dangerous and mad. He that is drunk is not a man, because he is, for so long, void of reason that distinguishes a man from a beast.
  • William Penn

• Some of the domestic evils of drunkenness are houses without windows, gardens without fences, fields without tillage, barns without roofs, children without clothing, principles, morals or manners.
  • Benjamin Franklin

• Drunkenness is the vice of a good constitution or of a bad memory—of a constitution so treacherously good that it never bends till it breaks; or of a memory that recollects the pleasures of getting intoxicated, but forgets the pains of getting sober.
  • Colton

• It were better for a man to be subject to any vice, than to drunkenness: for all other vanities and sins are recovered, but a drunkard will never shake off the delight of beastliness.
  • Sir Walter Raleigh

• Man has evil as well as good qualities peculiar to himself. Drunkenness places him as much below the level of the brutes as reason elevates him above them.
  • Sir G. Sinclair

• Of all vices take heed of drunkenness; other vices are but fruits of disordered affections—this disorders, nay, banishes reason; other vices but impair the soul—this demolishes her two chief faculties, the understanding and the will; other vices make their own way—this makes way for all vices; he that is a drunkard is qualified for all vice.
  • Francis Quarles

• There is scarcely a crime before me that is not directly or indirectly caused by strong drink.
  • John Duke Coleridge

• Beware of drunkenness, lest all good men beware of thee; where drunkenness reigns, there reason is an exile, virtue a stranger, God an enemy; blasphemy is wit, oaths are rhetoric, and secrets are proclamations.
  • Francis Quarles

• Habitual intoxication is the epitome of every crime.
  • Douglas Jerrold

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy says that the effect of a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.
  • Douglas Adams

• Here's what the Encyclopedia Galactica has to say about alcohol. It says that alcohol is a colourless volatile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars and also notes its intoxicating effect on certain carbon-based life forms.
  • Douglas Adams

• One reason I don't drink is that I want to know when I'm having a good time.
  • Nancy Astor

• The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind.
  • Humphrey Bogart

• It only takes one drink to get me drunk-- I can just never remember if its the eighth or ninth.
  • George Burns

• What's drinking? A mere pause from thinking!
  • Lord Byron, The Deformed Transformed

• When I sell liquor, it's bootlegging. When my customers serve it on Lake Shore Drive, it's hospitality.
  • Al Capone

• I drink when I have occasion, and sometimes when I have no occasion.
  • Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

• The last time I seen my father, he was blind in the cedars from drinking. And every time he put the bottle to his mouth, he don't suck out of it, it sucks out of him...
  • Chief Bromden from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

• I drink too much. Way too much. I gave a urine sample, there was an olive in it.
  • Rodney Dangerfield

• My family was a bunch of drunks. When I was six I came up missing, they put my picture on a bottle of scotch.
  • Rodney Dangerfield

• The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this.
  • Albert Einstein, My First Impression of the USA (1921)

• Bacchus hath drowned more men than Neptune.
  • Thomas Fuller

• My manager told me, Mitch, don't use alcohol as a crutch. I can't use alcohol as a crutch because a crutch is something that helps me walk. Alcohol severely fucks up the way I walk. It's more like the step I didn't see.
  • Mitch Hedberg

• Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
  • Ernest Hemingway

• Well I ain't seen my baby since I don't know when,
  I've been drinking bourbon whiskey, scotch and gin
  Gonna get high man I'm gonna get loose,
  Need me a triple shot of that juice
  Gonna get drunk don't you have no fear
  I want one bourbon, one scotch and one beer
  One bourbon, one scotch, one beer.
  • John Lee Hooker, One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer

• The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature.
  • William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, Chapter: Mysticism

• 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 in to this vice. The demon of intemperance ever seems to have delighted in sucking the blood of genius and generosity.
  • Abraham Lincoln, Address to the Washington Temperance Society, Springfield, Illinois, 22 February (1842).

• When alchemists first learned how to distill spirits, they called it aqua vitae, the water of life, and far from considering it the work of the devil, they thought the discovery was divinely inspired.
  • Gene Logsdon, Good Spirits

• I feel sorry for people who don't drink. They must have that morning feeling all the time.
  • Dean Martin

• If you drink, don't drive. Don't even putt.
  • Dean Martin

• You are not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on.
  • Dean Martin

• I'll stick with gin. Champagne is just ginger ale that knows somebody.
  • M*A*S*H, (spoken by Hawkeye), Ceasefire (1973).

• Never cry over spilt milk. It could've been whiskey.
  • Pappy Maverick, in Maverick (1994).

• The chief reason for drinking is the desire to behave in a certain way, and to be able to blame it on alcohol.
  • Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook (1960).

• The harsh, useful things of the world, from pulling teeth to digging potatoes, are best done by men who are as starkly sober as so many convicts in the death-house, but the lovely and useless things, the charming and exhilarating things, are best done by men with, as the phrase is, a few sheets in the wind.
  • H.L. Mencken, Prejudices, Fourth Series (1924).

• Candy is dandy
  But liquor is quicker.
  • Ogden Nash, Reflection on Ice-Breaking

• An abstainer is the sort of man you wouldn't want to drink with even if he did.
  • George Jean Nathan

• I drink to make other people interesting.
  • George Jean Nathan

• Being hungover is like winning the lottery, only they pay you in regret.
  • Ryan North, Dinosaur Comics

• When we drink, we get drunk. When we get drunk, we fall asleep. When we fall asleep, we commit no sin. When we commit no sin, we go to heaven. Sooooo, let's all get drunk and go to heaven!
  • Brian O'Rourke

• It is most absurdly said, in popular language, of any man, that he is disguised in liquor; for, on the contrary, most men are disguised by sobriety.
  • Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1856).

• Drunkenness is temporary suicide.
  • Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

• When the wine goes in, strange things come out.
  • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, The Piccolomini (1799).

• To alcohol: the cause of --- and solution to --- all of life's problems.
  • Homer J. Simpson from The Simpsons

• I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day.
  • Frank Sinatra

• Alcohol is the answer... What was the question?
  • The Streets

• If when you say 'whiskey' you mean the devil's brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster that defiles innocence, dethrones reason... then I am certainly against it. But, if when you say 'whiskey' you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine... the drink that enables a man to magnify his joy... then I am certainly for it. This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise.
  • Noah Sweat

• It is all well and good for children and acid freaks to still believe in Santa Claus — but it is still a profoundly morbid day for us working professionals. It is unsettling to know that one out of every twenty people you meet on Xmas will be dead this time next year... Some people can accept this, and some can't. That is why God made whiskey, and also why Wild Turkey comes in $300 shaped canisters during most of the Christmas season.
  • Hunter S. Thompson

• I wouldn't recommend drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me.
  • Hunter S. Thompson

• Of the demonstrably wise there are but two: those who commit suicide, and those who keep their reasoning faculties atrophied by drink.
  • Mark Twain, Note-Book (1935).

• Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
  • Oscar Wilde

• When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.
  • Henny Youngman

• My grandmother is over eighty and still doesn't need glasses. Drinks right out of the bottle.
  • Henny Youngman

• Oh brother, be a brother, fill this tiny cup of mine. And please, sir, make it whiskey: I have no head for wine!
  • Nick Cave, lyric, Brother My Cup is Empty

• Worf: Romulan ale should be illegal

Geordi: It is

• • Star Trek: Nemesis

• The wine-cup is glad! Dear Zenophile's lip
  It boasts to have touched when she stooped down to sip.
  Happy wine-cup! I wish that, with lips joined to mine,
  All my soul at a draught she would drink up like wine.
  • Acilius

• When I think of all the people I respect the most, you're right there, serving them drinks.
  • Scott Adams

• When you drink, don't drive. Don't even putt.
  • Dean Martin

• You're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on.
  • Dean Martin

• I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day.
  • Frank Sinatra

• R-e-m-o-r-s-e,
  Those dry Martinis were too much for me.
  Last night I really felt immense,
  To-day I feel like thirty cents;
  It is no time for mirth and laughter
  In the cold gray dawn of the morning after.
  • George Ade

• The horse and mule live thirty years
  And nothing know of wines and beers;
  The goat and sheep at twenty die,
  With never a taste of scotch or rye;
  The cow drinks water by the ton,
  And at eighteen is mostly done.
  Without the aid of rum or gin
  The dog at fifteen cashes in;
  The cat in milk and water soaks,
  And then at twelve years old it croaks;
  The modest, sober, bone-dry hen
  Lays eggs for nogs and dies at ten;
  All animals are strictly dry;
  They sinless live and swiftly die,
  While sinful, gleeful, rum-soaked men
  Survive for three score years and ten.
  And some of us - a mighty few -
  Stay pickled 'till we're ninety-two.
  • Harlan Fiske Stone, reported in Alpheus Thomas Mason, Harlan Fiske Stone, Pillar of the Law (1956), p. 731.

• Drink is the curse of the land. It makes you fight with your neighbour. It makes you shoot at your landlord and it makes you miss him.
  • Irish proverb

W. C. Fields

• Everybody has to believe in something... I believe I'll have another drink.

• Christmas at my house is always at least six or seven times more pleasant than anywhere else. We start drinking early. And while everyone else is seeing only one Santa Claus, we'll be seeing six or seven.

• Once ... in the wilds of Afghanistan, I lost my corkscrew, and we were forced to live on nothing but food and water for days.
  • My Little Chickadee

• I was in love with a beautiful blonde once, dear. She drove me to drink. That's the one thing I'm indebted to her for.
  • Never Give a Sucker an Even Break

• How well I remember my first encounter with The Devil's Brew. I happened to stumble across a case of bourbon— and went right on stumbling for several days thereafter.

• I certainly do not drink all the time. I have to sleep you know.

• I exercise extreme self control. I never drink anything stronger than gin before breakfast.

• More people are driven insane through religious hysteria than by drinking alcohol.

• The cost of living has gone up another dollar a quart.

• Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house unless they have a well-stocked bar.

• When life hands you lemons, make whisky sours.

• Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snake bite, and furthermore, always carry a small snake.

Attributed

• They don't want us to drink and drive, but you need a drivers license to buy alcohol and why do bars have parking lots? Bob and Tom in the Morning.

• You know you have a drinking problem when the bartender knows your name. And you've never been to that bar before.
  • Zach Galifianakis

• Have you ever been so drunk you wet the bed? Not even sleeping, just standing over, pissing on it?
  • Zach Galifianakis

• I don't have a drinking problem. I drink, I get drunk, I fall down. No problem!
  • unknown, but included as Dwarven joke from World of Warcraft

• The only alcohol problem I have is not having any.

• Wine goes with wine and the two should never part.

• I drink to forget all the stupid things I do when I'm drunk.

• There are more old drunkards than there are old doctors.

• I have an alcohol allergy... Every time I drink, I break out in hand cuffs.