Jean Kennedy Smith Quotes

We advocate the repeal of the 18th Amendment.

The saloon is as dead as slavery.

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

When Prohibition was first enacted in 1920, most people stockpiled alcohol, thinking they'd have enough to last them for years. By 1923, that was starting to run out, so your average person started to rely more and more on criminals.

Prohibition begets proliferation

[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 American people have said that they do not want any liquor sold, and they have said it emphatically by passing almost unanimously the constitutional amendment '

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.

Prohibition? I drink to its health whenever I can.

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

Prohibition makes you want to cry into your beer and denies you the beer to cry into.

'Boardwalk' begins literally on the first day of Prohibition, which I think was a wonderful way to start - to have the story kind of come out of this massive historical phenomenon. And the more I researched the '20s, the more I discovered just how interesting it was.

I looked back on the roaring Twenties, with its jazz, 'Great Gatsby' and the pre-Code films as a party I had somehow managed to miss.

The last copy of the Chicago Daily News I picked up had three crime stories on its front page. But by comparison to the gaudy days, this is small-time stuff. Chicago is as full of crooks as a saw with teeth, but the era when they ruled the city is gone forever.

Someone once accused me of being like Eliot Ness. I sad no sir, I'm not E.N., but I can promise you that I'm not Al Capone!

The Prohibition era is so vividly depicted in 'Lawless.' John Hillcoat does a remarkable job of rooting his film in such a tangible reality.

One of the things is that the good intentions of Prohibition, from reading over the years and from becoming obsessed with the research of gangs in New York City, seems to have allowed crime figures at the time, like Luciano, Capone, Torrio and Rothstein, to organize to become more powerful, which pulled all the way through until the '70s.

There'd never been a more advantageous time to be a criminal in America than during the 13 years of Prohibition. At a stroke, the American government closed down the fifth largest industry in the United States - alcohol production - and just handed it to criminals - a pretty remarkable thing to do.

How many gangsters you know, from Al Capone up to John Gotti, been gay?

I started with the book 'Boardwalk Empire' and then immersed myself in the history of Atlantic City, World War I, the temperance movement, Prohibition, pop culture. I even read the news and magazines of the period just to soak in it. That was before I even started thinking of the story.

Prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes crimes out of things that are not crimes.

The country is being flooded with illegal liquor and that either Congress will need to modify the law or spend incalculable sums to enforce it [Prohibition].

Everybody calls me a racketeer. I call myself a business man. When I sell liquor, it's bootlegging. When my patrons serve it on a silver tray on Lake Shore Drive [in Chicago] it's hospitality.

Prohibition created more drunks than anything else.

Prohibition is a Constitutional mandate and I hold it absolutely necessary to give it a fair and thorough trial.