Quotes & Sayings About Liquor Prohibition

Neither, it turned out, was politics. His views on government were strong, if a trifle simplistic. The cause of the Depression, he felt, was Al Capone. "The trouble with the nation's economy," he declared, was simply Prohibition, which "makes it possible for large-scale dealers in illicit liquor to amass tremendous amounts of currency"; the "present economic crisis," he explained, was due to the "withdrawal of billions of dollars from the channels of legitimate trade" by these bootleggers. — Robert A. Caro

After the war, Prohibition was passed, and with liquor no longer legally available the nation plunged headlong into the Great Depression. — Dave Barry

Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?. . .Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition - shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor - no, that couldn't happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! — Sinclair Lewis

I am against Prohibition because it has set the cause of temperence back twenty years; because it has substituted an ineffective campaign of force for an effective campaign of education; because it has replaced comparatively uninjurious light wines and beers with the worst kind of hard liquor and bad liquor; because it has increased drinking not only among men but has extended drinking to women and even children. — William Randolph Hearst

Prohibition was better than no liquor at all. — Kurt Vonnegut

Understand now, I'm purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political science, but I believe strongly that such a law as one prohibiting liquor is foolish, and all the writers, keenly interested in human welfare whom I know, laugh at the prohibition law. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Marijuana prohibition is just the stupidest law possible ... Jus t legalize it and tax it like we do liquor. — Morgan Freeman

Much of Texas took its prohibition seriously. Not Dalhart. It took its whiskey seriously, in part because some of the finest corn liquor in America was coming out of the High Plains. — Timothy Egan

The Volstead Act, prohibiting the production, sale, and transport of "intoxicating liquors," became law on January 17, 1920. Prohibition didn't prohibit much, and incited a great deal. By September 1922 it was already obvious that prohibition, known with varying degrees of irony as the Great Experiment, was experimenting mostly with the laws of unintended consequences. Its greatest success was in loosening the nation's inhibitions with bathtub gin - what they called "synthetic" liquor. — Sarah Churchwell

Though at times interested in reforms, notably prohibition (I have never tasted alcoholic liquor), I was inclined to be bored by ethical casuistry; since I believed conduct to be a matter of taste and breeding, with virtue, delicacy, and truthfulness as symbols of gentility. Of my word and honour I was inordinately proud, and would permit no reflections to be cast upon them. I thought ethics too obvious and commonplace to be scientifically discussed, and considered philosophy solely in its relation to truth and beauty. I was, and still am, pagan to the core. — H.P. Lovecraft

The law enforcement in this town is terrific. All through prohibition Eddie Mars' place was a night club and they had two uniformed men in the lobby every night-to see that the guests didn't bring their own liquor instead of buying it from the house. — Raymond Chandler

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

Liquor prohibition led to the rise of organized crime in America, and drug prohibition has led to the rise of the gang problems we have now. — Drew Carey

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

Prohibition is better than no liquor at all. — Will Rogers

Prohibition is to abstain from intoxicating liquor, as it makes us morbid and sometimes drunk. But we get drunk every day, nevertheless, not so much by the strength of what we sip from the cup, but that which we eat, the water we drink, and the air we inhale, which at fermentation conspire at eventide to make us so drunk and tired that we lose control of ourselves and fall asleep. Everybody is a drunkard, and if we were to enforce real prohibition we should all be dead. — Marcus Garvey

It's only since it's been made impossible that it's been made so damn easy. It's got like prohibition, with bums and crooks making fortunes out of hooch, everyone who might have had a palate losing it, nobody caring how you hold your liquor, you've been smart enough if you get it at all. You can't make good wine in a bathtub in the cellar, you need sun and rain and fresh air, you need pride in a job you can tell the world about. Only you can live without drink if you have to, but you can't live without love. — Mary Renault