Opiates Quotes - Page 2

• Men who stand in the highest ranks of society seldom hear of their faults; if by any accident an opprobrious clamour reaches their ears, flattery is always at hand to pour in her opiates, to quiet conviction and obtund remorse.

  Samuel Johnson

  Men, Hands, Ears

  Samuel Johnson (1761). “The Rambler: In Four Volumes”, p.65

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• Marx called religion an opiate, and all too often it is. But philosophy is an anaesthetic, a shot to keep the wonder away.

  N.D. Wilson

  Philosophy, Wonder, Shots

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• We also know that religion, as the Marxists have always insisted, has, too often, like an opiate, tended to put people to sleep to the reality and the need for the present struggle for peace and justice.

  Dorothy Day

  Struggle, Sleep, Reality

  "Month of the Dead". "Catholic Worker", November 1959.

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• Thus night with all her snares passed through the upper world and baited all heads sweetly, fed all foolish hopes, for night can bring to men all shrewish day denies, wrapped as a gift in the green leaves of opiate dream.

  Nikos Kazantzakis

  Dream, Night, Men

  Nikos Kazantzakis (1958). “the Odyssey a Modern Sequel”

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• Thy Banners gleam a little, and are furled; Against thy turrets surge His phantom tow'rs; Drugged with his Opiates the nations nod, Refusing still the beauty of thine hours; And fragile is thy tenure of this world Still haunted by the monstrous ghost of God.

  George Sterling

  Atheism, World, Littles

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• Mystery fiction is, after all, a substitute for tranquilizers, strong drink, and bad, if diverting, companions. One slips into bed ... onto the train ... into the chair in the sickroom ... and is suddenly transported to a place where light fights dark and wins. When the story's over, one is left without a hangover, without remorse. Can any other opiate make that claim?

  Mary Cantwell

  Strong, Hangover, Dark

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• Socialists do not merely want a welfare state, they absolutely must have one. They must have a grovelling dependent class from which to obtain their daily opiate: an hallucinogenic euphoria which comes from the delusion of being superior to and more altruistic than all others. They must have 'the poor, huddled masses' in much the same manner as vampires must have the blood of their victims.

  Edward Britton

  Blood, Class, Vampire

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• Well, when I was younger, in high school, I started out smoking pot. Which escalated into taking acid on a regular basis, which escalated into selling acid. And then I started, when I went to college, I started doing opiates.

  John Wozniak

  School, College, Smoking

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• Actually, fish are very sensitive creatures with highly developed nervous systems. They feel pain acutely. If they weren't able to feel pain, they, like us, could not have survived as a species. Their nervous systems, like ours, secrete opiate-like, pain-dampening biochemicals in response to pain.

  Sharon Gannon

  Pain, Able, Nervous

  "Sharon Gannon on Veganism". jivamuktiyoga.com. November 16, 2016.

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• Those who would most scornfully repudiate Christianity as a mere "opiate of the people" have a contempt for the rich, that is, for all mankind except the poor.

  C. S. Lewis

  Atheist, People, Christianity

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• Sometimes we are clarified and calmed healthily, as we never were before in our lives, not by an opiate, but by some unconscious obedience to the all-just laws, so that we become like a still lake of purest crystal and without an effort our depths are revealed to ourselves. . . .

  Henry David Thoreau

  Life, Lakes, Law

  Henry David Thoreau, Odell Shepard (1961). “The Heart of Thoreau's Journals”, p.44, Courier Corporation

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• Our lazy embrace of Stewart and Colbert is a testament to our own impoverished comic standards. We have come to accept coy mockery as genuine subversion and snarky mimesis as originality. It would be more accurate to describe our golden age of political comedy as the peak output of a lucrative corporate plantation whose chief export is a cheap and powerful opiate for progressive angst and rage.

  Steve Almond

  Powerful, Political, Lazy

  "The Joke’s on You" by Steve Almond, The Baffler, No. 20, www.huffingtonpost.com. July 19, 2012.

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• Marriage I think For women Is the best of opiates. It kills the thoughts That think about the thoughts, It is the best of opiates. So said Maria. But too long in solitude she'd dwelt, And too long her thoughts had felt Their strength. So when the man drew near, Out popped her thoughts and covered him with fear. Poor Maria! Better that she had kept her thoughts on a chain, For now she's alone again and all in pain; She sighs for the man that went and the thoughts that stay To trouble her dreams by night and her dreams by day.

  Stevie Smith

  Dream, Pain, Night

  Stevie Smith (2015). “Collected Poems and Drawings of Stevie Smith”, p.707, Faber & Faber

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• "I'm so sorry," I whisper. I lean forward and kiss him. His eyelashes flutter and he looks at me through a haze of opiates. "Hey, Catnip." "Hey, Gale," I say. "Thought you'd be gone by now," he says. My choices are simple. I can die like a quarry in the woods or I can die here beside Gale. "I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to stay right here and cause all kinds of trouble." "Me, too," Gale says. He just manages a smile before the drugs pull him back under.

  Suzanne Collins

  Sorry, Kissing, Simple

  "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire". Book by Suzanne Collins, September 1, 2009.

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• I sleep all day. Noises flit around the house- garbage truck in the alley, rain, tree rapping against the bedroom window. I sleep. I inhabit sleep firmly, willing it, wielding it, pushing away dreams, refusing, refusing. Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion. [...] It is afternoon, it is night, it is morning. Everything is reduced to this bed, this endless slumber that makes the days into one day, makes time stop, stretches and compacts time until it is meaningless.

  Audrey Niffenegger

  Dream, Morning, Rap

  Audrey Niffenegger (2014). “The Time Traveler's Wife”, p.513, Simon and Schuster

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• Calvin:"It says here that 'religion is the opiate of the masses.'...what do you suppose that means?" Television: "...it means that Karl Marx hadn't seen anything yet

  Bill Watterson

  Mean, Television, Mass

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• The helpless ecstasy of loosing himself in her charm was a powerful opiate rather than a tonic.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Powerful, Charm, Ecstasy

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• Perhaps the perusal of such works may, without injustice, be compared with the use of opiates, baneful, when habitually and constantly resorted to, but of most blessed power in those moments of pain and of langour, when the whole head is sore, and the whole heart sick. If those who rail indiscriminately at this species of composition, were to consider the quantity of actual pleasure it produces, and the much greater proportion of real sorrow and distress which it alleviates, their philanthropy ought to moderate their critical pride, or religious intolerance.

  Walter Scott

  Religious, Pain, Real

  Sir Walter Scott (1829). “The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart: Biographical and critical notices of eminent novelists”, p.256

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• ... fantasy is not practice for what is real—fantasy is the opiate of women.

  Shannon Hale

  Real, Practice, Fantasy

  Shannon Hale (2007). “Austenland: A Novel”, Bloomsbury USA

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• I can get away before the storm hits. Away from a world in which opiates have become the religion of the masses.

  Neil Gaiman

  Storm, World, Mass

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• You know how they say that religion is the opiate of the masses? Well I took masses of opiates religiously.

  Carrie Fisher

  Mass, Wells, Know How

  Carrie Fisher (2012). “Wishful Drinking”, p.99, Simon and Schuster

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• Might. Is there any opiate more powerful than that word?

  Libba Bray

  Powerful, Might

  Libba Bray (2010). “A Great and Terrible Beauty”, p.187, Simon and Schuster

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• Religion is the opium of the people translated from the German Die Religion ... ist das Opium des Volkessometimes misquoted as opiate of the people.

  Karl Marx

  People, Religion, Opium

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• We could decide simply to remain absorbed in the mysterious, unformed, free-play of reality. This would be the choice of the mystic who seeks to extinguish himself in God or Nirvana—analogous perhaps to the tendency among artists to obliterate themselves with alcohol or opiates. But if we value our participation in a shared reality in which it makes sense to make sense, then such self-abnegation would deny a central element of our humanity: the need to speak and act, to share our experience with others.

  Stephen Batchelor

  Artist, Reality, Self

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• Truth as a cultural ideal has functioned as an opiate, perhaps the only serious opiate of the modern world. Karl Marx said that religion was the opiate of the masses. Raymond Aron retorted that Marxist ideas were in turn the opiate of the intellectuals. There is perspicacity in both these polemical thrusts. But is perspicacity truth? I wish to suggest that perhaps truth has been the real opiate, of both the masses and the intellectuals.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Real, Ideas, Having Fun

  Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.81, Verso

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