Merle Haggard Quotes

The more necessary it becomes to stop drinking, the more impossible it becomes to stop.

It's that idea that you can have one drink - and no you can't. Within a week I was drinking heavily. It was so quick that even I was like, 'Wow.'

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

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.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

In my family, they were all big boozers.

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

Prohibition begets proliferation

Thou deputy of Pleimont and Boston, paint our words on paper and send them to those on whom thou art dependant; and say to them that all the allied Savages dwelling on the river Kenebek hate firewater…; and that if the English have any more of it brought hither to sell to the Savages, the latter will believe the English wish to exterminate them.

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.

First the man takes a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes the man.

The greatest pleasure of this people [Russians] is drunkenness.

We are fighting Germany, Austria and drink, and as far as I can see, the greatest of these three deadly foes is drink.

I just had one occasion in my life when suddenly my private life was everywhere, and that was an accident and beyond my control.

A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can't predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before.

A horrid alcoholic explosion scatters all my good intentions like bits of limbs and clothes over the doorsteps and into the saloon bars of the tawdriest pubs.

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.

Alcoholism is a dread, an awful, and fatal disease.

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

The mentality and behavior of drug addicts and alcoholics is wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless over their addiction and unless they have structured help they have no hope.

I look up the telephone number of Alcoholics Anonymous. Then, my hands shaking, I open the bar and drink the leftover whiskey, gin and vermouth-whatever I can lay my shaking hands on.

If I hadn't been a drunkard, I probably would have committed suicide long ago.

Alcohol is the river we sit on the banks of, contemplating. Sometimes we watch ourselves float past, sometimes we watch ourselves sink.

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

I never really had stage nerves but I did have had trouble getting up to the right energy level. For a long time I drank. I drank up until 1982 and then I gave up alcohol.