“The dipsomaniac and the abstainer are not only both mistaken, but they both make the same mistake. They both regard wine as a drug and not as a drink.”
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
~~~
“Teetotaler, n. One who abstains from strong drink, sometimes totally, sometimes tolerably totally.”
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
‘The Devil’s Dictionary’ (1911)
~~~
“On one occasion some one put a very little wine into a [glass], and said that it was sixteen years old. ‘It is very small for its age,’ said Gnathaena.”
Athenaeus, ‘The Deipnosophists’
~~~
“It was my Uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought.”
P. G. Wodehouse, The Inimitable Jeeves (1881-1975)
~~~
“Alcohol is a very necessary article. It enables Parliament to do things at eleven at night that no sane person would do at eleven in the morning.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Irish playwright
~~~
“As long as you represent me as praising alcohol I shall not complain. It is, I believe, the greatest of human inventions, and by far – much greater than Hell, the radio or the bichloride tablet.”
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American editor and critic.
~~~
“Alcohol is a misunderstood vitamin.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881-1975), English novelist
~~~
“Alcohol is necessary for a man so that he can have a good opinion of himself, undisturbed by the facts.”
Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936)
~~~
“Alcohol is a good preservative for everything but brains.”
Mary Pettibone Poole
~~~
“Only Irish Coffee provides in a single glass all four essential food groups: alcohol, caffeine, sugar, fat.”
Alex Levine
~~~
“When I think of Indonesia – a country on the equator with 180 million people, a median age of 18, and a Muslim ban on alcohol – I feel I know what heaven looks like.”
Coca Cola official
~~~
“In the United States all business not transacted over the telephone is accomplished in conjunction with alcohol or food, often under conditions of advanced intoxication. This is a fact of the utmost importance for the visitor of limited funds . . . for it means that the most expensive restaurants are, with rare exceptions, the worst.”
John Kenneth Galbraith, economist
~~~
“An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.”
Dylan Thomas
~~~
“Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) ‘Twelfth Night’
~~~
“I would give all my fame for a pot of ale, and safety.”
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) ‘King Henry V’
~~~
“I have fed purely upon ale; I have eat my ale, drank my ale, and I always sleep upon ale.”
George Farquhar (1678-1707)
~~~
“Some brewers of Ale and Beere doe put it into their drinke to make it more heady, fit to please drunkards, who thereby, according to their several dispositions, become either dead drunke, or foolish drunke, or madde drunke.”
Matthias de Lobel, Flemish botanist, 17th century
~~~
“There was an Old Man with an owl, Who continued to bother and howl; He sate on a rail, and imbibed bitter ale, Which refreshed that Old Man and his owl.”
Edward Lear, English artist, writer; known for his ‘literary nonsense’ & limericks (1812-1888)
~~~
“Said Aristotle unto Plato, ‘Have another sweet potato?’ Said Plato unto Aristotle, ‘Thank you, I prefer the bottle.’”
Owen Wister (1860-1938), American novelist
~~~
“Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.”
James Thurber (1894-1961)
American writer and cartoonist.
~~~
“We are fighting Germany, Austria and drink, and as far as I can see, the greatest of these three deadly foes is drink.”
David Lloyd George (1863-1945) British politician
~~~
“Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine.”
Fran Lebowitz, journalist
~~~
“Bacchus, n. A convenient diety invented by the ancients as an excuse for getting drunk.”
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
‘The Devil’s Dictionary’ (1911)
~~~
“I love drinking now and then. It defecates the standing pool of thought. A man perpetually in the paroxysm and fears of inebriety is like a half-drowned stupid wretch condemned to labor unceasingly in water; but a now-and-then tribute to Bacchus is like the cold bath, bracing and invigorating.”
Robert Burns (1759-1796) Scottish Poet
~~~
“In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is strength, in water there is bacteria.”
David Auerbach, 2002
~~~
“Champagne does have one regular drawback: swilled as a regular thing a certain sourness settles in the tummy, and the result is permanent bad breath. Really incurable.”
Truman Capote, ‘Answered Prayers’ (1975)
~~~
“Skiing consists of wearing $3,000 worth of clothes and equipment and driving 200 miles in the snow in order to stand around at a bar and drink.”
P.G. Wodehouse
~~~
“If you ever reach total enlightenment while drinking beer, I bet it makes beer shoot out your nose.”
Jack Handy
~~~
“Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”
Benjamin Franklin, (1706-1790).
~~~
“Why beer is better than wine: “….human feet are conspicuously absent from beer making.”
Steve Mirsky
Scientific American (May, 2007)
~~~
“Many battles have been fought and won by soldiers nourished on beer, and the King does not believe that coffee-drinking soldiers can be relied upon to endure hardships in case of another war.”
Frederick the Great of Prussia (1777)
Scientific American, June 1998.
~~~
“There was an Old Man of Columbia, Who was thirsty, and called out for some beer; But they brought it quite hot, in a small copper pot, Which disgusted that Man of Columbia.”
Edward Lear, English artist, writer; known for his ‘literary nonsense’ & limericks (1812-1888)
~~~
“He was a wise man who invented beer.”
Plato (Greek philosopher) 428- 347 BC
~~~
“What two ideas are more inseparable than Beer and Britannia?”
Sydney Smith (1771-1845)
English writer and Anglican clergyman, quoted in Hesketh Pearson’s ‘The Smith of Smiths’
~~~
“Beer: Take pure spring water. The finest grains. The richest ingredients. And then run them through a horse.”
unknown
~~~
“Milk is for babies. When you grow up you have to drink beer.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger (1975)
~~~
“Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza.”
Dave Barry
~~~
“Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer.”
Dave Barry
~~~
“People who drink light “beer” don’t like the taste of beer; they just like to pee a lot.”
Capital Brewery, Middleton, WI.
~~~
“I’m only a beer teetotaller, not a champagne teetotaller.”
George Bernard Shaw
~~~
“Those who drink beer will think beer.”
Washington Irving, American author (1783-1859)
~~~
“Most people hate the taste of beer – to begin with. It is, however, a prejudice that many people have been able to overcome.”
Winston Churchill
~~~
“Some people wanted champagne and caviar when they should have had beer and hot dogs.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969)
~~~
“Now Christmas comes, ’tis fit that we should feast and sing, and merry be: Keep open house, let fidlers play. A fig for cold, sing care away; And may they who thereat repine, On brown bread and on small beer dine.”
from the 1766 ‘Virginia Almanack’
~~~
“I never have more than one drink before dinner. But I do like that one to be large and very strong and very cold and very well made.”
James Bond, ‘Casino Royale’
~~~
“As long as you represent me as praising alcohol I shall not complain. It is, I believe, the greatest of human inventions, and by far – much greater than Hell, the radio or the bichloride tablet.”
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American editor and critic.
~~~
“Wine is the most healthful and most hygienic of beverages.”
Louis Pasteur (1822-1895)
~~~
“No nation is drunken where wine is cheap, and none sober where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage”
Thomas Jefferson (3rd President of U.S.)
~~~
“As long as you represent me as praising alcohol I shall not complain. It is, I believe, the greatest of human inventions, and by far – much greater than Hell, the radio or the bichloride tablet.”
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), American editor and critic.
~~~
“Rum and Coca-Cola is, by any measure, a drink of inspired blandness, with its two main ingredients both plentiful and cheap. It requires few if any skills to prepare.”
Wayne Curtis, ‘Rum and Coca-Cola’
The American Scholar (Summer 2006)
~~~
“The leaves and floures of Borrage put into wine make men and women glad and merry, driving away all sadnesse, dulnesse, and melancholy, as Dioscorides and Pliny affirme. Syrrup made of the floures of Borrage comforteth the heart, purgeth melancholy, and quieteth the phrenticke or lunaticke person.”
John Gerard
‘The Herball, or General Historie of Plantes’ (1597)
~~~
“My grandmother is over eighty and still doesn’t need glasses. Drinks right out of the bottle.”
Henny Youngman
~~~
“Wine is bottled poetry.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)
~~~
“Wine is grape juice. Every drop of liquid filling so many bottles has been drawn out of the ground by the roots of the vine.”
Hugh Johnson, wine book author
~~~
“It is the man who drinks the first bottle of saké; then the second bottle drinks the first, and finally it is the saké that drinks the man.”
Japanese proverb
~~~
“The road to great wine is littered with beer bottles.”
unknown
~~~
“At that comfortable tavern on Pontchartrain we had a bouillabaisse than which a better was never eaten at Marseilles; and not the least headache in the morning, I give you my word; on the contrary, you only wake with a sweet refreshing thirst for claret and water.”
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863)
~~~
“…..all the charming and beautiful things, from the Song of Songs, to bouillabaisse, and from the nine Beethoven symphonies to the Martini cocktail, have been given to humanity by men who, when the hour came, turned from tap water to something with color in it, and more in it than mere oxygen and hydrogen.”
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), American editor and critic.
~~~
“Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.”
Walker Percy (1916-1990)
~~~
“Let us candidly admit that there are shameful blemishes on the American past, of which the worst by far is rum. Nevertheless, we have improved man’s lot and enriched his civilization with rye, bourbon and the Martini cocktail. In all history has any other nation done so much?”
Bernard De Voto (1897-1955)
American writer and critic
~~~
“I have very poor and unhappy brains for drinking: I could well wish courtesy would invent some other custom of entertainment.”
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) ‘Othello’
~~~
“O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou has no name to be known by, let us call thee devil….O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! that we should, with joy, pleasance revel and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!”
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) ‘Othello’
~~~
“Alcohol is a good preservative for everything but brains.”
Mary Pettibone Poole
~~~
“BRANDY, n. A cordial composed on one part thunder-and-lightning, one part remorse, two parts bloody murder, one part death-hell-and-the-grave and four parts clarified Satan.”
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
‘The Devil’s Dictionary’ (1911)
~~~
“Claret is the liquor for boys; port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.”
Samuel Johnson
Quoted in James Boswell’s ‘Life of Samuel Johnson’
~~~
“There was an Old Person of Brussels, Who lived upon Brandy and Mussels; When he rushed through the town, he knocked most people down, Which distressed all the people of Brussels.”
Edward Lear, English artist, writer; known for his ‘literary nonsense’ & limericks (1812-1888)
~~~
“All alcoholic drinks, rightly used, are good for body and soul alike, but as a restorative of both there is nothing like brandy.”
George Saintsbury, English journalist (1845-1933)
~~~
“Place a substantial meal before a tired man and he will eat with effort and be little better for it at first. Give him a glass of wine or brandy, and immediately he feels better: you see him come to life again before you.”
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826)
~~~
“If wine tells truth — and so have said the wise, It makes me laugh to think how brandy lies!”
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-94)
U.S. writer, physician
~~~
“An aged Burgundy runs with a beardless Port. I cherish the fancy that Port speaks sentences of wisdom, Burgundy sings the inspired Ode.”
Ambrose Bierce, American writer (1842-1914)
~~~
“Burgundy makes you think of silly things; Bordeaux makes you talk about them, and Champagne makes you do them.”
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826)
~~~
“The thought of eating snails conjures up all kinds of weird mental pictures. This state of mind doesn’t last for long upon seeing how snails are prepared in Burgundy. We then realize how corrupt our mental picture of this delicacy was.”
Leon Kafka, Paris News Post (1951)