Samuel Johnson Quotes
Wine gives a man nothing. It neither gives him knowledge nor wit; it only animates a man, and enables him to bring out what a dread of the company has repressed. It only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost.
Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Charles Dilly, 1791.
This is one of the earliest observations of the fact that after drinking alcohol, a person is apt to speak without his usual inhibitions and judgment. This has been the downfall of many politicians and is the largest problem of maintaining secrecy and confidentiality.
Samuel Johnson, often referred to as Dr Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor, and lexicographer. Religiously, he was a devout Anglican, and politically a committed Tory. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes Johnson as "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history". He is the subject of James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson, described by Walter Jackson Bate as "the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature".
