Prohibition Quotes

“Federal and state laws (should) be changed to no longer make it a crime to possess marijuana for private use.”
― Richard Nixon

“The amount of money and of legal energy being given to prosecute hundreds of thousands of Americans who are caught with a few ounces of marijuana in their jeans simply makes no sense - the kindest way to put it. A sterner way to put it is that it is an outrage, an imposition on basic civil liberties and on the reasonable expenditure of social energy.”
― William F. Buckley

“Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself; and where they are, they should be changed. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against possession of marijuana in private for personal use... Therefore, I support legislation amending Federal law to eliminate all Federal criminal penalties for the possession of up to one ounce [28g] of marijuana.”
― Jimmy Carter

“Prohibition... goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes... A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.”
― Anonymous

“The legalization of marijuana is not a dangerous experiment – the prohibition is the experiment, and it has failed dramatically, with millions of victims all around the world.”
― Sebastian Marincolo

“Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits. Fanatics will never learn that, though it be written in letters of gold across the sky. It is the prohibition that makes anything precious”
― Mark Twain

“There has never been a 'war on drugs'! In our history we can only see an ongoing conflict amongst various drug users – and producers. In ancient Mexico the use of alcohol was punishable by death, while the ritualistic use of mescaline was highly worshipped. In 17th century Russia, tobacco smokers were threatened with mutilation or decapitation, alcohol was legal. In Prussia, coffee drinking was prohibited to the lower classes, the use of tobacco and alcohol was legal.”
― Sebastian Marincolo

“Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate oneself within astronomy. On the day that I was born, 13 April 1949, nineteen senior Nazi officials were convicted at Nuremberg, including Hitler's former envoy to the Vatican, Baron Ernst von Weizsacker, who was found guilty of planning aggression against Czechoslovakia and committing atrocities against the Jewish people. On the same day, the State of Israel celebrated its first Passover seder and the United Nations, still meeting in those days at Flushing Meadow in Queens, voted to consider the Jewish state's application for membership. In Damascus, eleven newspapers were closed by the regime of General Hosni Zayim. In America, the National Committee on Alcoholism announced an upcoming 'A-Day' under the non-uplifting slogan: 'You can drink—help the alcoholic who can't.' ('Can't'?) The International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled in favor of Britain in the Corfu Channel dispute with Albania. At the UN, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko denounced the newly formed NATO alliance as a tool for aggression against the USSR. The rising Chinese Communists, under a man then known to Western readership as Mao Tze-Tung, announced a limited willingness to bargain with the still-existing Chinese government in a city then known to the outside world as 'Peiping.'

All this was unknown to me as I nuzzled my mother's breast for the first time, and would certainly have happened in just the same way if I had not been born at all, or even conceived. One of the newspaper astrologists for that day addressed those whose birthday it was:

There are powerful rays from the planet Mars, the war god, in your horoscope for your coming year, and this always means a chance to battle if you want to take it up. Try to avoid such disturbances where women relatives or friends are concerned, because the outlook for victory upon your part in such circumstances is rather dark. If you must fight, pick a man!

Sage counsel no doubt, which I wish I had imbibed with that same maternal lactation, but impartially offered also to the many people born on that day who were also destined to die on it.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“The problems raised by alcohol and tobacco cannot, it goes without saying, be solved by prohibition. The universal and ever-present urge to self-transcendence is not to be abolished by slamming the currently popular Doors in the Wall. The only reasonable policy is to open other, better doors in the hope of inducing men and women to exchange their old bad habits for new and less harmful ones.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception / Heaven and Hell

“Prohibition may be the greatest gift any government ever gave its citizens. A barrel of beer cost $4 to make and sold for $55. A case of spiritous liquor cost $20 to produce and earned $90--and all this without taxes.”
― Bill Bryson, One Summer: America, 1927

“Roscoe was spiritually illegal, a bootlegger of the soul, a mythic creature made of words and wit and wild deeds and boundless memory.”
― William Kennedy, Roscoe

“-in almost all stories of promises and prohibitions, the promises and prohibitions carry with them the inevitability of failure, of their own breaking.”
― A.S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye: Five Fairy Stories

“Your pretended fear lest error should step in, is like the man who would keep all wine out of the country, lest men should be drunk. It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon a supposition he may abuse it. When he doth abuse it, judge.”
― Oliver Cromwell

“The forbiddenness of a fruit makes even the taste of a lemon sweet.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“If you don't like wine, don't prohibit those who love wine. Alcohol, we know, is very powerful. Use, but do not abuse it. And by no means condemn the totality. By doing that you deny God, since He has created all the things that should be enjoyed by human beings without excess. In drinking moderately, you taste and know what it is. In drinking to the point of drunkenness, you revert and become uncivilised. If you don't drink at all you lose something from earth. But if you impede this enjoyment you are just as criminal as the one who kills by taking the life of the individual. You take away pleasure and freedom, and this action I call criminal tyranny. You force the honest one to cheat, the truthful one to lie, and the sober one to become a drunkard.”
― Henri Charpentier, The Henri Charpentier Cookbook

“It might be in a saloon with jingled townsmen, or with a genial railroad man well lighted up and armed with pocket flasks, or with a bunch of alki stiffs in a hang-out. Yes; and it might be in a prohibition state...”
― Jack London, John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs

“Anna Schrader was another of the women who came to Portland during the Girl Rush, arriving in 1910. Census records indicate she was married at the age of eighteen, presumably in Minnesota, where she was born and raised. She became a gadfly for the local Portland police and provided them with a great deal of useful information regarding bootlegging during Prohibition. This was possible because of her affair with police lieutenant William Breuning, who had gotten her the job of "private detective.”
― Theresa Griffin Kennedy, Murder & Scandal in Prohibition Portland: Sex, Vice Misdeeds in Mayor Baker's Reign

“It is illegitimate to conclude from the prohibition anything regarding the nature of what is prohibited; for the prohibition proceeds by dishonouring the guilty, that is to say, by inducing a disfigured or displaced image of the thing that is really prohibited or desired. Indeed, this is how social repression prolongs itself by means of psychic repression without which it would have no grip on desire.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari

“All right. Then I'll begin... It's the tale of a man who drank the demon's liquor and gained immortality. That miserable man's lonely, lonely yarn. The stage is Prohibition-era New York. It's the story of the peculiar destiny surrounding the death sudden appearance of the liquor of immortality and of the spiral of people who found themselves drawn into it...”
― Ryohgo Narita, バッカーノ！The Rolling Bootlegs

“One mode of anti-frontier and anti-self-reliance propaganda is contemporary hysteria about gun control – a part of the materialistic determinism of the hour. To the superficial minds of “Liberals,” collectivists, Marxians, et al., instruments are supposed to act upon man, and men (no longer self-reliant) merely to be acted upon: to them, murder lies in the gun and not in the soul of man. So they think that to deprive men of guns would prevent man from murder!

“What the Power Boys – the insiders – behind the gun controls really want, of course, is not to control guns but to control us. They want registration so that they can confiscate; they want to confiscate so that they will have power and we shall be powerless – even as we live today upon a wild frontier demanding ever more self-reliance.

“On the old frontier, men had to rely upon themselves and had to be armed until there were sound laws and until law-enforcement officers could enforce the laws. Today laws against thieves, muggers, thugs, rapist, arsonists, looters, murderers (thanks largely to the “Liberal” majority on the Supreme Court) are diluted almost to the point of abolition; the Marshal Dillons of the world, thanks to the same Court, are disarmed or emasculated, they are told to respect the “rights” of thieves, muggers, thugs, rapists, arsonists, looters, muggers, above the right of good citizens to be secure from such felons.

“Good citizens, deprived of the processes of the law or the protection of the police, are supposed to accept their lot as the passive happy victims of “the unfortunate,” sheep to be sheared of feed to the wolves bleating about the loveliness of it all. It is “violence” if good citizens defend themselves; it is not “violent” but “protest” if they or their property are assaulted. So gun controls are the order of the day – gun controls that will disarm me of good will, but will not disarm the Mafia, the mobs out on a spree, the wolves on the prowl, the men of ill will.

“This is a part of the “Liberal” sentimentality that does not see sin, evil, violence, as realities in the soul of man. To the “Liberal,” all we need is dialogue, discussion, compromise, co-existence, understanding – always in favor of the vicious and never in defense of the victim. The sentimental “Liberal,” fearful of self-reliant man, believes this to be a good thing; the cynical Power Boys pretend to believe it, and use it for their own ends.

“Gun control is the new Prohibition. It will not work, as Prohibition did not work. But meanwhile, it will be tried, as a sentimental cure-all, a new usurpation of the rights of a once thoroughly self-reliant people, another step on the march to 1984. It is only a symptom of our modern disease, but it is well worth examining at a little more length. And, as I recently made a trip to the land of Sentimentalia, and brought back a published account of gun control there, I hope you will permit me to offer it as evidence speaking to our condition:

“A few hundred of the several hundred million citizens of Sentimentalia have in recent years been shot by criminals. The Congress of that land, led by Senators Tom Prodd and Jokey Hidings, and egged on by the President, responded with a law to first register, and eventually confiscate, all the wicked instruments known as ‘guns.’ The law was passed amid tears of joy.

“But, alas, when guns continued to be used by the happy thugs thus freed from the fear of being shot by self-reliant citizens, the Prohibitionists claimed that this meant that knives need to be forbidden… and then violence and murders would end.”
― E. Merrill Root

“The War on Drugs will go down in history as the most racist crusade since slavery.”
― Thor Benson

“As they entered, Lemuel Sixpack was in the middle of his trademark long- winded oration. His last name was really Sixpack and, as a proverbial icing on the cake, he represented the Prohibition Party.”
― Krzysztof Pacyński, A perfect Patricide: Part 1

“The Prohibition era had been a great source of material for building an excellent science of alcohol intoxication”
― Deborah Blum, The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York

“I believe in being everlastingly on the warpath.”
― Carrie Nation

“In 1905, more than 1,700 young women made Portland their home. That trickle soon became a flood, and by 1907 more than 7,000 women a year were coming to Portland look for new lives.”
― Theresa Griffin Kennedy, Murder & Scandal in Prohibition Portland: Sex, Vice Misdeeds in Mayor Baker's Reign

“PROHIBITION FOR THE POOR'
...From a criminal viewpoint the desirability of sobering the southern negro speaks volumes for national prohibition.”
― Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, The Golden Age

“On August 1, 1632, the Society of Jesus strictly prohibited and condemned the doctrine of the atoms.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

“It wasn't a group of hard drinkers, bootleggers, smugglers or cocktail enthusiasts that had suddenly become Prohibition's most powerful opponents, it was a legion of mothers. Alcohol's greatest ally was a now formidable and elegantly coiffed host of mostly middle- and upper-class housewives.”
― Mallory O'Meara, Girly Drinks: A World History of Women and Alcohol

“Alcohol is a far greater killer than all opiates. You can buy alcohol on any street corner throughout the world. It gets your brain, your liver. It destroys your morals, destroys your vitality, kills the sexual potential, and you become sluggish. It was a great pity that Prohibition failed. The experiment was too radical. Instead of barring it altogether, the dispensation of alcohol should have been under prescription, or some other control. Prohibition was one of the worthiest attempts of a group to impose their will upon the rest of the people. But of course if you prohibit something you deprive people of an essential liberty; when you deny the right of choice you oppose the greatest gift in the world. People will not stand for it. Alcohol makes man mad, leads to such strange behaviourism. Yet beer and liquor ads maintain newspapers, television, some huge portion of the national and the world economy. Drinker that I am, I think essentially I am the victim of an addiction that is here in the world, revealed to all, exposed to all. It is there. We who are weak take to it and are destroyed by it, but is essentially a weakness of governments everywhere to allow this poison to circulate like a river through the bloodstream of the human race. As one of the heartiest drinkers in the world, I speak with a voice of authority.”
― Errol Flynn, My Wicked, Wicked Ways

“Drinking was a great leveller, not because it made everyone equally drunk but because it made everyone equally guilty.”
― Sarah Churchwell, Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby by Churchwell, Sarah (2014) Paperback