Drink Quotes

“After picturing Prohibition as a hated anachronism, which was held in contempt by Americans of either sex and every age, the Wickersham report drew attention to its discriminatory nature, so alien to the principles of America. It noted that it had been “easier to shut up the open drinking places and stop the sale of beer, which was drunk chiefly by working men, than to prevent the wealthy from having and using liquor in their homes and in their clubs. . . . Thus the law may be made to appear as aimed at and enforced against the insignificant while the wealthy enjoy immunity. This feeling is reinforced when it is seen that the wealthy are generally able to procure pure liquors, where those with less means may run the risk of poisoning through the working over of denatured alcohol or, at best, must put up with cheap, crude, and even deleterious products.”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“However, in 1928 the Du Ponts, hitherto staunch Prohibitionists, assumed leadership of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA). Their stated reason for this volte-face was to preserve the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution; their tacit motivation was a desire to reduce their tax bills by restoring liquor revenues. They were joined by senior management from other large businesses, including Western Union and Standard Oil.”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“Instead of becoming pious models of self-restraint”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“Unlike the saloons they replaced”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“Although the brewers tried to fight back”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“The merchant ships that carried tea from India to Great Britain were loaded with beer for the voyage out. Expatriate Britons in the subcontinent had prodigious thirsts for their native brews and paid the highest prices for any that reached them without spoiling. The passage to India crossed the equator twice”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“As a Texan periodical observed of its readership”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“The intransigence of immigrant voters was not the only obstacle temperance reformers faced at the polls. American elections were notoriously wet events. Just as Athenian citizens in the days of Plato had received free wine on important civic occasions”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“in 1831 a “self-made cheese-monger” named Joseph Livesey launched a campaign against drinking that attacked the habit from a new and radical angle. Livesey hailed from Preston in northeast England—the heartland of the textiles industry. It was an environment where the benefits of sobriety were immediately evident to both employers and employees: Factory work required precision”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“By the 1820s”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“Moreover”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“The problem of Indian drinking worsened as spirits became ubiquitous in colonial America. Since the native tribes had no place for alcoholic drinks in their cultures or diets”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“Drunkenness was ubiquitous in the young republic. Its towns were packed with taverns”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“The name Manhattan is reputed to be of bibulous origin: According to a Moravian missionary”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“In addition to the aforementioned exceptions”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“The first part of the continent in which distillation flourished was Germany”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“Such extravagance was not merely hedonism but a duty. It was part and parcel of being upper class. The responsibility is apparent in an English allegorical poem of the period entitled “Winner and Waster,” which represents acts of conspicuous distribution and consumption as being the perfect expressions of the aristocratic ethos.”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“While Aristotle had worked it out in principle and succeeded in turning wine into water”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“These spectacles were staged to purchase the affection of the masses. The republic was dead”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“Their compliments were almost universal, their warnings few, if dire. Wine was a force for good, a substance that enabled people to relax while simultaneously elevating their minds, inspiring drinkers to “laughter and wisdom and prudence and learning.”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“Eagerness in drinking is a practice injurious to the partaker. Do not haste to mischief, my friend. Your drink is not being taken from you. It is given you, and waits you.”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol