Top 100 Quotes About Prohibition
#1. As with most consensual crimes, this prohibition of hemp is both silly and sinister.
Peter McWilliams
#2. We have seen the evil of the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors in our midst; let us try prohibition and see what this will do for us.
Thomas Jordan Jarvis
#3. It is not classified as a pagan religion. The so-called New Age activities and this are not called religions and therefore don't come under the prohibition of mingling church and state that we have in this country.
Dixie Lee Ray
#4. Since the 1920s, when some U.S. cruise ships decided to fly a Panamanian flag to avoid Prohibition regulations, ships have commonly flown the flag of countries foreign to their owners. The benefits are obvious: lower taxes, laxer labor and safety laws.
Rose George
#5. I predicted that if control of drugs were administered by law enforcement agencies, the result would be a black market more irrational and widespread than that of alcohol prohibition and the growth of enormous police-state repressive bureaucracy. And who, indeed, wanted that?
Timothy Leary
#6. There is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution. There's a prohibition against taking it away.
Alberto Gonzales
#7. All organisation is and must be grounded on the idea of exclusion and prohibition just as two objects cannot occupy the same space
Arthur Miller
#8. The prohibition of drugs causes crime. You don't have to legalize, just decriminalize it.
Jesse Ventura
#9. When we finally decide that drug prohibition has been no more successful than alcohol prohibition, the drug dealers will disappear.
Ron Paul
#10. To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves: such a prohibition ought to fill them with disdain.
Claude Adrien Helvetius
#11. In New York, with Prohibition in full swing, he thought he had died and gone o hell for his sins. Then he discovered speakeasies and he rejoiced.
Frank McCourt
#12. [As in the case of] alcohol prohibition, illegality has driven organized crime, sent countless people to jail, and killed many thousands. Repression does not work.
Sam Branson
#13. Prohibition may be a disputed theory, but none can say that it doesn't hold water.
Thomas L. Masson
#14. 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.
Terence Winter
#15. In this regard, I reiterate that the prohibition against torture cannot be contravened under any circumstances.
Pope Benedict XVI
#16. Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.
W.C. Fields
#17. He had heard it sure enough, wailing underground in clubs and speakeasies, all through Prohibition, hot, polyphonic, toe-tapping, full of syncopated rhythms and bent, naughty notes - perfect for small and secret spaces.
Nicole Mones
#18. In 1996, Shakespeare's 'Twelfth Night' was removed from classrooms after a school board passed a 'prohibition of alternative lifestyle instruction' act. Apparently, a young female character disguised as a boy was a danger to the youth of Merrimack, New Hampshire.
Richard LaGravenese
#19. Parents must not only have certain ways of guiding by prohibition and permission, they must also be able to represent to the child a deep, almost somatic conviction that there is meaning in what they are doing.
Erik Erikson
#20. Nor is the Gita a collection of do's and dont's. What is lawful for one may be unlawful for another. What may be permissible at one time, or in one place, may not be so at another time, and in another place. Desire for fruit is the only universal prohibition. Desirelessness is obligatory.
Mahatma Gandhi
#21. Since the writing of our Constitution, our religious liberties have been systematically threatened and whittled away by Supreme Court justices who interpret the First Amendment as a prohibition against religious activity on public property.
Tim LaHaye
#22. Your mother and I do not approve of drinking. Have you not heard of the Eighteenth Amendment?"
"Prohibition? I drink to its health whenever I can.
Libba Bray
#23. Liquor prohibition led to the rise of organized crime in America, and drug prohibition has led to the rise of the gang problems we have now.
Drew Carey
#24. After the war, Prohibition was passed, and with liquor no longer legally available the nation plunged headlong into the Great Depression.
Dave Barry
#25. Prohibition may be the greatest gift any government ever gave its citizens. A barrel of beer cost $4 to make and sold for $55. A case of spiritous liquor cost $20 to produce and earned $90
and all this without taxes.
Bill Bryson
#26. Marijuana prohibition is just the stupidest law possible ... Jus t legalize it and tax it like we do liquor.
Morgan Freeman
#27. Slavery ended in medieval Europe only because the church extended its sacraments to all slaves and then managed to impose a ban on the enslavement of Christians (and of Jews). Within the context of medieval Europe, that prohibition was effectively a rule of universal abolition.
Rodney Stark
#28. Race mixing becomes a crime worse than treason. Humans being humans, and sex being sex, that prohibition never stopped anyone. There were mixed kids in south Africa 9 months after the first Dutch boats hit the beach at Table Bay.
Trevor Noah
#29. I used often to go to America during Prohibition, and there was far more drunkenness there then than before; the prohibition of pornography has much the same effect.
Bertrand Russell
#30. God is a too palpably clumsy answer; an answer which shows a lack of delicacy towards us thinkers-fundamentally, even a crude prohibition to us: you shall not think!
Friedrich Nietzsche
#31. Our nearly century-long experiment in banning marijuana has failed as abysmally as Prohibition did ... In contrast, legalizing and taxing marijuana would bring in substantial sums that could be used to pay for schools, libraries or early childhood education.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#32. That the work of a drinker who had no intention of stopping drinking should become a major propaganda piece in the campaign for Prohibition is surely one of the ironies in the history of alcohol.
Jack London
#33. There are criminals who are drug users, but most addicts are criminals only by virtue of prohibition or from resorting to crime to pay inflated black market prices.
Danny Sugerman
#34. Prohibition didn't work in the Garden of Eden. Adam ate the apple.
Vicente Fox
#35. The Prohibition era is so vividly depicted in 'Lawless.' John Hillcoat does a remarkable job of rooting his film in such a tangible reality.
Dane DeHaan
#36. In the 1920s, we thought the problems associated with alcohol could be solved by police and jails. Prohibition taught us we were wrong. The strategy of the present drug war is Prohibition redux.
Rodney S. Quinn
#37. Drugs are a tragedy for addicts. But criminalizing their use converts that tragedy into a disaster for society, for users and non-users alike. Our experience with the prohibition of drugs is a replay of our experience with the prohibition of alcoholic beverages.
Milton Friedman
#38. No political party can ever make prohibition effective. A political party implies an adverse, an opposing, political party. To enforce criminal statutes implies substantial unanimity in the community. This is the result of the jury system. Hence the futility of party prohibition.
Rutherford B. Hayes
#39. And when Prohibition came along, Dr. Sharpe's Shakti Tonic took off like a rocket, mostly due to its hefty eighteen percent alcohol content.
Donald O'Donovan
#40. Shall we ever live to see the following wise prohibition - the audience is forbidden to smoke and the masters are forbidden to 'smoke out' the audience by playing exchanging variations?
Savielly Tartakower
#41. Much of Texas took its prohibition seriously. Not Dalhart. It took its whiskey seriously, in part because some of the finest corn liquor in America was coming out of the High Plains.
Timothy Egan
#42. Reporters now are better educated than the crowd I knew when I broke in. We still had guys shaped by Prohibition and the Depression, so the news business still had badly paid people who loved it for the life, because every day was different.
Pete Hamill
#43. Drug prohibition has caused gang warfare and other violent crimes by raising the prices of drugs so much that vicious criminals enter the market to make astronomical profits, and addicts rob and steal to get money to pay the inflated prices for their drugs.
Michael Badnarik
#44. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.
William F. Buckley Jr.
#46. Funny to watch these Senators switching back and forth on Prohibition. Politics is a great character builder. You have to take a referendum to see what your convictions are for that day.
Will Rogers
#47. To be intensely educated about the horror of sin and then to be conquered by it. I tell myself that it must be prohibition that kindles fantasy
Umberto Eco
#48. A total prohibition against lying is also ethically incoherent in anyone but a true pacifist.
Sam Harris
#49. Up until Prohibition, an apple grown in America was far less likely to be eaten than to wind up in a barrel of cider. ("Hard" cider is a twentieth-century term, redundant before then since virtually all cider was hard until modern refrigeration allowed people to keep sweet cider sweet.)
Michael Pollan
#50. 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.
Bill Bryson
#51. From the outset, MoMA followed the Bauhaus's strict prohibition against design that even hinted at the decorative, a prejudice that skewed the pioneering museum's view of Modernism for decades.
Martin Filler
#52. By pretending that convention is Nature, that disobeying a personal prohibition is a medical illness, they establish themselves as agents of social control and at the same time disguise their punitive interventions in the semantic and social trappings of medical practice.
Thomas Szasz
#53. I hear it was the fact that the Brennans had a hellfireanddamnation preacher runnin' their family back in Prohibition days and you Gallaghers were runnin' moonshine to get by and got caught. Your family blamed the Brennans for rattin' you out, and that started a feud," Rosalie said.
Carolyn Brown
#54. Every 'good' scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.
Karl R. Popper
#55. So glistered the dire Snake , and into fraud Led Eve, our credulous mother, to the Tree Of Prohibition, root of all our woe.
John Milton
#56. Shameless, impudent, meddling females, who presumed to set at naught the Society's prohibition on women's magic, and duped the common people with their potions and cantrips!
Zen Cho
#57. I was playing birthday parties. House-rent parties where they used to sell whisky during prohibition.
Thelonious Monk
#58. Evidence ... proves that prohibition only drives drunkenness behind closed doors and into dark places, and it does not cure it or even diminish it.
Mark Twain
#59. The 'smoke-filled room' as political reality is now as dead as Prohibition.
Theodore H. White
#60. One role of prohibition is in making the drug market more lucrative.
Milton Friedman
#61. Trying to wage war on 23 million Americans who are obviously very committed to certain recreational activities is not going to be any more successful than Prohibition was.
James Carriger Paine
#62. Although she was fragile in appearance, every prohibition lost substance in her presence.
Elena Ferrante
#63. British diplomats and Anglo-American types in Washington have a near-superstitious prohibition on uttering the words 'Special Relationship' to describe relations between Britain and America, lest the specialness itself vanish like a phantom at cock-crow.
Christopher Hitchens
#64. Frenchmen drink wine just like we used to drink water before Prohibition.
Ring Lardner Jr.
#65. Moral codes were not designed to be selective, nor indeed were they designed to be questioned. You could not say that you would observe this prohibition but not that. I shall not commit theft
certainly not
but adultery is another matter: wrong for other people, but not for me.
Alexander McCall Smith
#66. Prohibition is an attempted cure that makes matters worse - for both the addict and the rest of us.
Milton Friedman
#67. The lesson has already been learned with alcohol prohibition. We tried to engineer an alcohol-free society and ended up with huge criminal enterprises, government corruption, children lured into organized crime and random violence that took the lives of countless innocent people.
Kurt Schmoke
#68. Le religioni non sono altro che residuo dei vecchi tabu selvatici, sistemi di divieto con diverse sovrastrutture ideologiche."
" ... religions are nothing but remnant of the old wild taboos, prohibition systems with varying ideological superstructure.
Giovanni Papini
#69. It is well known that if there is anything that makes men thirstier than the acquisition of knowledge it is the full or partial prohibition of drinking.
Andrzej Sapkowski
#70. In fact, the whole thing about prohibition is this: it isn't the initial cost, it's the humidity.
Sinclair Lewis
#71. We either believe in the dignity of the individual, the rule of law, and the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, or we don't. There is no middle ground.
Leon Panetta
#72. We are sometime truly to see our life as positive, not negative, as made up of continuous willing, not of constraints and prohibition.
Mary Parker Follett
#73. 90% of the problem with marijuana is prohibition related, not use related.
Gary Johnson
#74. The Compromise of 1850 provided that the prohibition of slavery should be left up to the individual States, thus thwarting the Canaanites in their attempts to make this problem an excuse for federal intervention and a cause of war between the States.
Eustace Mullins
#76. Prohibition has made nothing but trouble
Al Capone
#77. Communism is like prohibition, it is a good idea, but it won't work.
Will Rogers
#78. The prohibition of L'shon Hara is the Jewish equivalent of the Buddhist practice of Right Speech.
Sylvia Boorstein
#79. I maintain the importance of an absolute prohibition against torture, while acknowledging that even absolute prohibitions can sometimes be broken. If that is a contradiction, it is a contradiction that ethics has to embrace, or else it becomes like glass: hard, clear, but fatally inflexible.
Julian Baggini
#80. God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers- at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think!
Friedrich Nietzsche
#81. Prohibition only drives drunkenness behind doors and into dark places, and does not cure it or even diminish it.
Mark Twain
#82. For a prohibition always increases an illicit desire so long as the love of and joy in holiness is too weak to conquer the inclination to sin ...
Augustine Of Hippo
#83. Regardless of what one's attitude towards prohibition may be, temperance is something against which, at a time of war, no reasonable protest can be made.
William Lyon Mackenzie King
#84. Golf is not a good walk spoiled. It is becoming a good walk prohibited. Show me the common sense in this and I promise I will relent. But there is no common sense at all in the prohibition of walking.
Lorne Rubenstein
#85. '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.
Michael Pitt
#86. Let's end the unworkable marijuana prohibition and put our money where our mouth is. Let's solve the problems like border crime. We can do it with pot legalization.
Gary Johnson
#87. On this matter I'm inclined to agree with the French, who gaze upon any personal dietary prohibition as bad manners.
Charles Dickens
#88. No doubt metaphors are dangerous- and perhaps especially so in philosophy. But a prohibition against their use would be a willful and harmful restriction upon our powers of inquiry.
Max Black
#89. Three times I have been mistaken for a prohibition agent, but never had any trouble clearing myself.
Dashiell Hammett
#90. Prohibition ... goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes ... A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.
Abraham Lincoln
#91. There has never been any art or literature without drink and there never will be....Unless something is done about the matter [prohibition] this country is going to the dogs. There has been no development in our art or literature for 30 or 40 years.
Joseph Pennell
#92. The first precept in Buddhism is "Do not kill." This precept is not merely a legalistic prohibition, but a realization of our affinity with all who share the gift of life. A compassionate heart provides a firm ground for this precept.
Dhammananda Bhikkhuni
#93. Prohibition is a hard sounding word, worthless as a rallying cry, hard as a locked door or going to bed without your supper.
Nellie L. McClung
#94. They talk about prohibition in America. What can one do in a country such as that?
'What does one do in America when one is sad - without alcohol?' asks Zwonimir.
Joseph Roth
#95. Every generation has a macabre notion that wars, government prohibition, natural disasters or mankind itself could be the downfall of society and the world as a whole.
Lauren DeStefano
#96. I knew that the Hague Convention prohibited the use of poison in war. I didn't know the details of the terms of the Convention, but I did know of that prohibition.
Otto Hahn
#97. Prohibition is better than no liquor at all.
Will Rogers
#98. Where will you find any code of laws among civilized men in which the commands and prohibitions are not founded on Christian principles? I need not specify the prohibition of murder, robbery, theft, trespass.
Noah Webster
#99. Under the First Amendment's prohibition of the establishment of religion, the Court has steadily made religion a matter for the private individual by driving it out of the public arena.
Robert Bork
#100. How often would I have the chance to see a pretty girl bathing? I could recall no specific prohibition from the church or the Scriptures, though I knew it was wrong. But maybe it wasn't terribly sinful.
John Grisham
