Oscar Wilde Quotes
Oh, he occasionally takes an alcoholiday.
The distinction between recreational drinking and heavy drinking is a subtle one and rarely made until modern times. Most leaders who would not have heavy drinkers in positions of responsibility were usually themselves teetotalers and they were very rare. Heavy drinkers and alcoholics have been in positions of responsibility throughout history including modern times—eg House Ways & Means Chairman Wilbur Mills and Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Peter was unusual in that he made the distinction.
The graphic for this quote is the original illustration from the article. German WWII propaganda characterized Churchill as a hugly overweight, ugly, drunk. Churchill was a relatively heavy drinker of alcohol.
There was no Federal regulation of food and drink then. Fast buck whisky purveyors would include all kinds of ingredients and processes, safe and sanitary or not. Many Americans died or became very sick from eating tainted food then. Even bad whisky had killed many. TR chose whisky as his example, because Congress was filled with heavy drinkers and whisky was then the favorite Congressional drink. Roosevelt, with these tactics got the first federal food regulatory laws passed over enourmous opposition, not unlike the fight over Obamacare which would take place a century later.
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, the early 1890s saw him become one of the most popular playwrights in London. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts in "one of the first celebrity trials", imprisonment, and early death from meningitis at age 46.
