Gordon Lightfoot Quotes

I love a drink. But I've never, ever in my life been on a stage and done a performance with an alcoholic drink inside me. Never have, never would. I've seen people who do and invariably they're never as good as they think they are.

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.

I haven't had an alcoholic drink in 22 years, but when I did drink I'd go for either Canadian whisky or Budweiser. Sometimes both. For a long time I used to think "Hey you, get off the floor!" was my name.

As an alcoholic, you will violate your standards quicker than you can lower them.

the reward for total abstinence from alcohol seems, illogically enough, to be the capacity for becoming intoxicated without it.

Anybody can be a non-drunk. It takes a special talent to be a drunk. It takes endurance. Endurance is more important than truth.

I've been in a treatment center for drinkin'. I stayed for two days, then escaped.

I didn't think I could go onstage and play unless I had a beer to loosen up. Well, if it was only one beer to loosen up, I'd probably still be drinking today.

I get nervous every time, for every single performance, before getting up on that stage.

If the headache would only precede the intoxication, alcoholism would be a virtue.

I never had one beer. If I bought a six-pack of beer, I kept drinking till all six beers were gone. You have to have that kind of understanding about yourself. I haven't had a drink now in 12 years.

My mother is still battling alcoholism.

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

When you get onstage, you can see everyone in the audience's face, down to the detail. You can see who may or may not be yawning.

One Saturday in 1984, I walked into my first AA meeting. I went regularly for six years and only stopped when I came to realize my underlying problem was not genuine alcoholism, but depression.

But I think that the most important thing was to really stop drinking.

I had what AA calls 'a convincer' - which made me realize that I couldn't do it any more. I went out drinking for about 70 hours here in London. At the end I knew I was done.

It's not cool to be an alcoholic.

I began drinking alcohol at the age of thirteen and gave it up in my fifty sixth year; it was like going straight from puberty to a mid-life crisis.

Alcohol remained, and remains, a vital instrument of social control, used without any regard to its horrifying consequences in addiction and violence.

But who is it that has made my people drunk? Indians cannot make whiskey. Indians do not sell it. But white people make it and bring it among us. It is they that have brought the evil upon us and we cannot remove it. The white people can remove it and now we call upon them to do it. We ask them to take their whiskey and run away, and leave us sober as they found us.

[Referring to alcohol:] After the lapse of nearly fifty years of undisputed political freedom, the blood-freezing clank of a cruel bondage is still heard.

... the sin of drunkenness which is the root of all sins.

This government can't afford two drunkards. You've got to stop.

Smoking, chewing betel nut, and taking drugs for pleasure are not for Christians. These practices are wrong because (1) they make us their slaves, (2) they harm our bodies, and (3) they are unclean … It can be very hard to give up these habits. But we must do so to please Jehovah.