Every reader of the French or German papers knows that not a day passes without producing some uneasy discussion of supposed socia...l decrepitude;Mfalling off of the birthrate;Mdecline of rural population;Mlowering of army standards;Mmultiplication of suicides;Mincrease of insanity or idiocy,--of cancer,--of tuberculosis;Msigns of nervous exhaustion,--of enfeebled vitality,--"habits" of alcoholism and drugs,--failure of eyesight in the young,--and so on, without end.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hermann Goering, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer, Walther Frank, Julius Streicher and Robert Ley did pass under my inspection... and interrogation in 1945 but they only proved that National Socialism was a gangster interlude at a rather low order of mental capacity and with a surprisingly high incidence of alcoholism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If we became students of Malcolm X, we would not have young black men out there killing each other like they're killing each other... now. Young black men would not be impregnating young black women at the rate going on now. We'd not have the drugs we have now, or the alcoholism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How much disgruntled heaviness, lameness, dampness, dressing gown--how much beer there is in the German intelligence! How is it at... all possible that young men who dedicate their lives to the most spiritual goals do not feel the first instinct of spirituality, the spirit's instinct of self-preservation--and drink beer?... The alcoholism of the young scholars is perhaps no question mark concerning their scholarliness--without spirit one can still be a great scholar--but in every other respect it remains a problem.--Where would one not find the gentle degeneration which beer produces in the spirit?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Alcoholism is a search for a common language, or at least, it is a compensation for a language that has been lost. The use of drug...s does not imply the overestimation of the value of language but of silence. Drunkenness exaggerates communication; drugs destroy it. Young people's preference for drugs reveals a change in the contemporary attitude toward language and communication. The first to see the differences between drugs and wine was Baudelaire: "Wine exalts the will; hashish destroys it. Wine is a physical stimulant; hashish a suicidal weapon. Wine mellows us and makes us sociable; hashish isolates us." Wine is social, drugs solitary; the one inflames the senses, the other rouses the imagination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists.... When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of our...selves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence. Lying is like alcoholism. You are always recovering.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »