Opiates Quotes

Economic theology is the opiate of the middle classes.

It is the around-the-corner brand of hope that prompts people to action, while the distant hope acts as an opiate.

Tobacco is the opiate of the gentleman, the religion of the rich.

I did masses of opiates religiously.

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

A bookshop is powder-magazine, a dynamite-shed, a drugstore of poisons, a bar of intoxicants, a den of opiates, an island of sirens.

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.

Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.

Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don’t take it too seriously.

I will take no more physick, not even my opiates; for I have prayed that I may render up my soul to God unclouded.

Television in its present form…[is] the opiate of the people of the United States.

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.

And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.

The chemistry of dissatisfaction is as the chemistry of some marvelously potent tar. In it are the building stones of explosives, stimulants, poisons, opiates, perfumes and stenches.

Marx was wrong. Religion is not the opiate of the people. Opium suggests something soporific, numbing, dulling. Too often religion has been an aphrodisiac for horror, a Benzedrine for bestiality. At its best it has lifted spirits and raised spires. At its worst it has turned entire civilizations into cemeteries.

A solitary ascetic is a symbol of the most cowardly egotism; a hermit who flees from his brothers instead of helping them to carry the burden of life, to work for others, and to put their shoulders to the wheel of social life, is a coward who hides himself when the battle is on, and goes to sleep drunk on an opiate.

I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.

Parenthood is the opiate of the masses.

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

I don’t like speed. I would have made a terrible Futurist. Even when I did take drugs, I never liked amphetamines and much preferred the slow taffy-pull of time that you get with opiates.

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

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

Marx said that religion was the opiate of the people. In the United States today, opiates are the religion of the people.

Communism is the opiate of the intellectuals – With no cure except as a guillotine might be called a cure for dandruff.

In 1844, Karl Marx said, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” He said this at a time when opium and opium derivatives were the only painkillers. And he said it helped a little. He might as well have said, “Religion is the aspirin of the people.”