Let’s Toast To These 70 Classic Quotes About Drinking

By Lorenzo Jensen III,
Flickr / Henry Burrows
Flickr / Henry Burrows

1.

There comes a time in every woman’s life when the only thing that helps is a glass of champagne.
—Bette Davis

2.

You can learn a lot about a woman by getting smashed with her.
—Tom Waits

3.

I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.
—Dorothy Parker

4.

One more drink and I’ll be under the host.
—Mae West

5.

Alcohol may be man’s worst enemy, but the bible says love your enemy.
—Frank Sinatra

6.

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

7.

Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.
—George Bernard Shaw

8.

Everybody’s got to believe in something. I believe I’ll have another beer.
—W. C. Fields

9.

In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is Freedom, in water there is bacteria.
—Benjamin Franklin

10.

I like whiskey. I always did, and that is why I never drink it.
—Robert E. Lee

11.

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

12.

Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald

13.

I know I’m drinking myself to a slow death, but then I’m in no hurry.
—Robert Benchley

14.

I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.
—Sylvia Plath

15.

I drink to make other people more interesting.
—Ernest Hemingway

16.

Next to music, beer was best.
—Carson McCullers

17.

Here’s to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald

18.

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

19.

The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.
—William Butler Yeats

20.

Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.
—Ogden Nash

21.

Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we’re not poets.
—Dudley Moore

22.

You put three girls in a house, and all of a sudden before you know it, you’re talking about boys and drinking whiskey, and things go down and you get deep real quick.
—Katie Aselton

23.

I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly.
—Winston Churchill

24.

Let us be lazy in everything, except in loving and drinking, except in being lazy.
—Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

25.

Liquor is the chloroform which enables the poor man to endure the painful operation of living.
—George Bernard Shaw

26.

When you stop drinking, you have to deal with this marvelous personality that started you drinking in the first place.
—Jimmy Breslin

27.

I see that a man cannot give himself up to drinking without being miserable one half his days and mad the other.
—Anne Bronte

28.

War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.
—William Faulkner

29.

I am more afraid of alcohol than of all the bullets of the enemy.
—Stonewall Jackson

30.

There is no bad whiskey. There are only some whiskeys that aren’t as good as others.
—Raymond Chandler

31.

It’s like gambling somehow. You go out for a night of drinking and you don’t know where you’re going to end up the next day. It could work out good or it could be disastrous. It’s like the throw of the dice.
—Jim Morrison

32.

I always take Scotch whiskey at night as a preventive of toothache. I have never had the toothache; and what is more, I never intend to have it.
—Mark Twain

33.

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.
—Hunter S. Thompson

34.

An American monkey, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.
—Charles Darwin

35.

That is the remarkable thing about drinking: it brings people together so quickly, but between night and morning it sets an interval again of years.
—Erich Maria Remarque

36.

When a man who is drinking neat gin starts talking about his mother he is past all argument.
—C. S. Forester

37.

I don’t have a drinking problem ‘cept when I can’t get a drink.
—Tom Waits

38.

Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.
—Raymond Chandler

39.

Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.
—G. K. Chesterton, Heretics

40.

Now don’t say you can’t swear off drinking; it’s easy. I’ve done it a thousand times.
—W. C. Fields

41.

My justification is that most people my age spend a lot of time thinking about what they’re going to do for the next five or ten years. The time they spend thinking about their life, I just spend drinking.
—Amy Winehouse

42.

I’ve stopped drinking, but only while I’m asleep.
—George Best

43.

A man’s true character comes out when he’s drunk.
—Charlie Chaplin

44.

Tequila. Straight. There’s a real polite drink. You keep drinking until you finally take one more and it just won’t go down. Then you know you’ve reached your limit.
—Lee Marvin

45.

Alcohol gives you infinite patience for stupidity.
—Sammy Davis, Jr.

46.

I try not to drink too much because when I’m drunk, I bite.
—Bette Midler

47.

Alcohol is necessary for a man so that he can have a good opinion of himself, undisturbed be the facts.
—Finley Peter Dunne

48.

It’s okay saying sorry, but when you are drunk you say what you really feel.
—Vidal Sassoon

49.

Here’s to alcohol: the cause of, and answer to, all of life’s problems.
—Matt Groening

50.

I don’t even drink! I can’t stand the taste of alcohol. Every New Year’s Eve I try one drink and every time it makes me feel sick. So I don’t touch booze—I’m always the designated driver.
—Kim Kardashian

51.

I prefer to think that God is not dead, just drunk.
—John Huston

52.

If everybody in this town connected with politics had to leave town because of chasing women and drinking, you would have no government.
—Barry Goldwater

53.

So, after awhile, you can only get so much happiness from a guy who’s drunk come up and tell you you’re great.
—Rick Derringer

54.

Of all vices, drinking is the most incompatible with greatness.
—Walter Scott

55.

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.
—William James

56.

But the trouble is that when you drink it, you invariably meet other people drinking it.
—Oliver Reed

57.

Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use any other drug with special horror.
—William S. Burroughs

58.

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.
—Marguerite Duras

59.

Alcohol is a very patient drug. It will wait for the alcoholic to pick it up one more time.
—Mercedes McCambridge

60.

Paintings are like a beer, only beer tastes good and it’s hard to stop drinking beer.
—Billy Carter

61.

The worse you are at thinking, the better you are at drinking.
—Terry Goodkind

62.

Alcohol decimated the working class and so many people.
—Martin Scorsese

63.

Drinking intensifies all your pressures and your needs.
—Desi Arnaz

64.

I loved the full heat of being drunk, like I was made of melting chocolate and spreading in all directions.
—Leslie Jamison

65.

Nothing bonds two solitary individuals like a good shared drunk. This is a scientific fact. It’s important, even necessary for the long-term welfare of the planet to get good and shit-faced with your neighbor every now and then.
—Sol Luckman

66.

The piano has been drinking, not me.
—Tom Waits

67.

I’ve never understood people who just go out for one drink. Once I have one drink, I want all the drinks.
—Vicki Lesage

68.

Those partial to drink were hiding faults and dishonesty. They were sloppy souls, even the ones with pleasant manners and fine noses.
—Sarah Hall

69.

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

70.

The only cure for a real hangover is death.
—Robert BenchleyThought Catalog Logo Mark
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About the author

Lorenzo Jensen III

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