John Kendrick Bangs Quotes

I prefer milk because I am a Prohibitionist, but I do not go to it for inspiration.

Prohibition has made nothing but trouble.

Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.

Prohibition is a deathblow to the liberty of the individual …

We advocate the repeal of the 18th Amendment.

[Describing Prohibition:] Politicians are ducking, candidates are hedging, the Anti-Saloon League is prospering, people are being poisoned, bootleggers are being enriched, and Government officials are being corrupted.

The South is dry and will vote dry. That is everybody who is sober enough to stagger to the polls will.

Prohibition is an awful flop. We like it. It can't stop what it's meant to stop. We like it. It's left a trail of graft and slime, It don't prohibit worth a dime, It's filled our land with vice and crime. Nevertheless, we're for it.

This is destined to be a very wealthy portion of the United States, and, if to this we can add the most temperate, nothing will prevent our rising, and becoming a valuable acquisition to the union. Much power now lies in your hands, and, I sincerely hope, we may commence our new career with a law in our statute books, prohibiting the manufacture and sale of ardent spirits in Oregon territory.

Prohibition? I drink to its health whenever I can.

Prohibition is a hard sounding word, worthless as a rallying cry, hard as a locked door or going to bed without your supper.

Should ardent spirits be everywhere banished from the list of drinks, it will be a revolution not the least remarkable in this revolutionary age, and our country will have its full share in that as in other merits.

We are nowhere forbidden to laugh.

Come, try, give any one of us, for instance, a little more independence, untie our hands, widen the spheres of our activity, relax the control and we...yes, I assure you...we should be begging to be under control again at once.

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

I have always claimed Americans didn't want a drink as bad as they wanted the right to take a drink if they did happen to want one.

To have too much time is not good, you have to force yourself. And human beings aren't meant for true freedom. I've learned that, having had it.

those who are afraid of freedom are those who cannot trust us to live in them. Trying to keep the law is actually a declaration of independence, a way of keeping control

Liquor - you can make it illegal but you can't make it unpopular.

Thus, dear friends, I have said it clearly enough, and I believe you ought to understand it and not make liberty a law.

We tend to seek captivity because we are used to seeing freedom as something that has neither frontiers nor responsibilities.

It was not that Adam ate the apple for the apple's sake, but because it was forbidden. It would have been better for us-oh infinitely better for us-if the serpent had been forbidden.

When your response to everything that is wrong with the world is to say, 'there ought to be a law,' you are saying that you hold freedom very cheap.

Is it against the law for me to know it?

As soon as one promises not to do something, it becomes the one thing above all others that one most wishes to do.