Opium Quotes - Page 5

• Suffice it to say that Wall Street investors in the drug industries have used the government to unleash and transform their economic power into political and global military might; never forget, America is not an opium or cocaine producing nation, and narcotic drugs are a strategic resource, upon which all of the above industries - including the military - depend. Controlling the world's drug supply, both legal and illegal, is a matter of national security.

  Douglas Valentine

  Wall, Military, Political

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• If I were money-motivated, I would spread insidious lies that marijuana is dangerous and addictive and leads to dancing with white women, that your children are at risk of riding that freight train straight into hell or an opium den. Then I'd parlay that fear into a chain of overpriced "rehab" centers that can cure them and shake Satan from their souls. But I am not that ambitious. I am a drunk.

  Doug Stanhope

  Children, Lying, Marijuana

  Source: hightimes.com

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• I think it's basically quite different from dreams. If only cinema was that easy. Because dreams, all you have to do is fall asleep, and you can have fantastic vision. I know Baudelaire and people like that enhance their dreams with opium or something. But films are very constructed - they're like architecture. They're pieced together, glued together. To me, it's a craft. It's like making a tapestry.

  Kenneth Anger

  Dream, Fall, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The Iranian government has become pretty open about the drug problem in recent years. Opium use is a very traditional, cultural thing in Iran, so the government is actually more open about it than they are about some of the other ills in society. They just don't want to talk about things that might relate to a Western lifestyle even though they know that Iranians indulge. Because there is no real public life left in Iran - people go and have dinner and then everything retreats behind these Persian walls.

  Hooman Majd

  Wall, Real, People

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• Every time we are confronted with a new revolution we take to the opium pipes of our own propaganda.

  I. F. Stone

  Revolution, Propaganda, Pipe

  I. F. Stone (2009). “The Best of I.F. Stone”, p.155, PublicAffairs

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• Religion used to be the opium of the people. To those suffering humiliation, pain, illness, and serfdom, religion promised the reward of an after life. But now, we are witnessing a transformation, a true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, we are not going to be judged.

  Czeslaw Milosz

  Atheist, Pain, Betrayal

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• The film drama is the opium of the people…down with bourgeois fairy-tale scenarios…long live life as it is!

  Dziga Vertov

  Drama, Live Life, Long

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• So much of today's film culture, in England and America, is based on lies, really. The industry is very ambitious, and success has become such an opium, people start from the wrong place they forget sometimes that the core of what we do is storytelling. It serves a need, a purpose for the individual and society to pull us together in shared experience and help us realize we're not alone in that experience.

  Joe Wright

  Lying, England And America, People

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• All political power comes from the barrel of either guns, pussy, or opium pipes, and people seem to like it that way.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Gun, People, Political

  Hunter S. Thompson (2011). “Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the F”, p.26, Simon and Schuster

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• After fulfilling its destructive urge towards everything that is noble and good on earth, it [naive Religion] sketches, in its opium intoxication, a picture of the future situation, which differs drastically from the order of this world, since everything changes and is renewed.

  Bruno Bauer

  Order, Noble, World

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• Without opium, plans, marriages and journeys appear to me just as foolish as if someone falling out of a window were to hope to make friends with the occupants of the room before which he passes.

  Jean Cocteau

  Fall, Journey, Rooms

  Jean Cocteau (1990). “Opium: The Illustrated Diary of His Cure”, Peter Owen Publishers

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• In beauty of face no maiden ever equaled her. It was the radiance of an opium-dream - an airy and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the fantasies which hovered about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Daughter, Dream, Soul

  Edgar Allan Poe (2008). “Tales of Mystery and Imagination”

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• To a child who dies, and to the parents of this child, will you speak, if religion consoles them, in praise of atheism? That one does not mistake: that, to my mind, does not prove anything against atheism and much against religion. "The heart of a heartless world, said Marx, the soul of soulless conditions." It is misery that makes religion, and it is why this one is miserable. Who would prohibit opium to a dying man? And what are we, out of oblivion or entertainment, anything else but dying?

  Andre Comte-Sponville

  Children, Mistake, Heart

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• I feel that opiates - I include opium and all its derivatives, such as morphine, heroin, pantopon, etc. - are quite useless for any sort of creative work, useful though they may be for routine work. Much of the hard physical work in the Far East is done by opium addicts.

  William S. Burroughs

  Routine Work, Creative, May

  Source: www.stopsmilingonline.com

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• History, having destroyed the religion as the opium of the people, now requires that they be given a taste of the real stuff.

  Auberon Waugh

  Real, People, Drug

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• It wasn't so much all the sex that robbed me of my moral bearings, but all the narcotics. I must say, there's something about opium that goes very well with lesbianism.

  Alan Moore

  Sex, Moral, Wells

  Alan Moore, Melinda Gebbie (2006). “Lost girls”

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• The appeal for drugs has dwindled. Except for actual opium. If I could get real opium, I'd stir it in my hot coffee every morning. People keep giving me marijuana. I've got pouches in a drawer. I've been meaning to smoke a joint and watch Abbott and Costello Go to Mars. I planned to do this three months ago and I still haven't gotten around to it.

  Nick Tosches

  Morning, Real, Coffee

  Source: www.esquire.com

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• I meant that people will take anything that gives them a lift, whether it's alcohol or cocaine or the consciousness-expanding drugs or opiates. In Iran, until recently, they sold opium in shops legally, and they had 3,000,000 addicts in a population of 15,000,000. I don't believe that all those people were escaping from "complexes" or anything of the sort. They were simply exposed to it.

  William S. Burroughs

  Believe, Escaping, Iran

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• If one looks into the genealogies of many 'old families,' one discovers episodes of slave trafficking, bootlegging, gun running, opium trading, falsified land claims, violent acquisition of water and mineral rights, the extermination of indigenous peoples, sales of shoddy and unsafe goods, public funds used for private speculations, crooked deals in government bonds and vouchers, and payoffs for political favors.

  Michael Parenti

  Running, Gun, Government

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• Reproof is a medicine, like mercury or opium; if it be improperly administered, it will do harm instead of good.

  Horace Mann

  Medicine, Criticism, Mercury

  Horace Mann (1872). “Thoughts Selected from the Writings of Horace Mann ...”, p.211

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• Coleridge: poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.

  Matthew Arnold

  Philosopher, Poet, Mist

  Matthew Arnold (1939). “Poetry & prose”

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• It's about the girlfriend who left me last year. I tried to put all my anger in those words, even though I'm just as much to blame for the break-up. 'Soma' is based on the idea that a love relationship is almost the same as opium: it slowly puts you to sleep, it soothes you, and gives you the illusion of sureness and security. Very deceivable.

  Billy Corgan

  Girlfriend, Sleep, Ideas

  "Smashing Pumpkins". Oor Magazine, June 10, 1993.

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• By the time writing was invented, the Greeks and Egyptians had already learned to extract opium from poppies to facilitate sleep.

  Kat Duff

  Sleep, Writing, Greek

  Kat Duff (2014). “The Secret Life of Sleep”, p.84, Oneworld Publications

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• The intellectual who no longer feels attached to anything is not satisfied with opinion merely; he wants certainty, he wants a system. The revolution provides him with his opium.

  Raymond Aron

  Intellectual, Atheism, Want

  Raymond Aron (2001). “The Opium of the Intellectuals”, p.257, Transaction Publishers

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• Let passion reach a catastrophe and it submits us to an intoxicating force far more powerful than the niggardly irritation of wine or of opium. The lucidity our ideas then achieve, and the delicacy of our overly exalted sensations, produce the strangest and most unexpected effects.

  Honore de Balzac

  Powerful, Passion, Wine

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