Popular quotes about Addiction! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
I am a community social psychologist and a lot of my work deals with social work and helping people overcoming addiction and trauma.
Chath PiersathIf you're to the point where you're trying to overcome that means you're at the point where you've admitted that you have a problem, and that might be your strongest point in the addiction.
Ryan MontgomeryDon't we get it? To put our arm around someone who is gay, someone who has an addiction, somebody who lives a different lifestyle, someone who is not what we think they should be... doing that has nothing to do with enabling them or accepting what they do as okay by us. It has nothing to do with encouraging them in their practice of what you or I might feel or believe is wrong vs right.It has everything to do with being a good human being. A good person. A good friend.
Daniel PearceThe bigger picture is that over the last 30 years, we have spent $1 trillion waging a drug war that has failed in any meaningful way to reduce drug addiction or abuse, and yet has siphoned an enormous amount of resources away from other public services, especially education.
Michelle AlexanderNo time for drug addiction, no time for smoke or booze. Too strong for a shortened life span, I've got no time to lose.
Henry RollinsGiving up an addiction means re-programming that part of your brain that makes you restless and unhappy if a desire is not realized.
Ken Keyes Jr.Gang members have invariably grown up in broken, chaotic homes, often experiencing domestic violence; they have truanted from school and many have been formally excluded; and they live in neighbourhoods where worklessness, addiction and crime are rife.
Iain Duncan SmithNo behavior can be changed before it's acknowledged. And no addiction is beyond the reach of Love.
Sarah Ban BreathnachIf a child has an older sibling involved in an addiction, there is a 90 percent chance that he or she will get involved too.
Virgil Miller NewtonFootbal is very much an addiction for me. This is something that I really need in my life. This is something that if I don't have it, I'm not a very pleasant person to be around.
John UrschelThat it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people...That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them.
David Foster WallaceCrack in the early 1980s or mid 1980s I'm sorry is that one of the worst myth is that one hit and you're addicted for life. We saw that in 1980s and we're seeing it again with methamphetamine today, one hit and you're addicted and it simply not true, addiction requires work not the people should go out and experiment or do these themselves but the fact is that's a myth and the concern is that, it's dangerous because when people perpetuates that myths and then when young people are people actually try methamphetamine or crack cocaine and find that, that doesn't happen to them.
Carl HartMaking my family laugh when I was little - it became an addiction. It was a kind of survival.
Sarah SilvermanAll the suffering, stress, and addiction comes from not realizing you already are what you are looking for.
Jon Kabat-ZinnWhat I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction.
Chuck PalahniukAccording to a recent study, ten percent of 'Star Trek' fans meet the psychological criteria for addiction. Deprived of their favourite show, some Trekkies disply withdrawal symptoms similar to drug addicts. Of course, the real difference is that drug addicts aren't nearly as annoying.
Jay LenoBy the Reagan era, the 'culture of poverty' had become a cornerstone of conservative ideology: poverty was caused not by low wages or a lack of jobs but by bad attitudes and faulty lifestyles. The poor were dissolute, promiscuous, prone to addiction and crime, unable to 'defer gratification' or possibly even set an alarm clock. The last thing they could be trusted with was money.
Barbara EhrenreichIt seems to me like Mother Nature's mercy and forgiveness have run dry, as we ceaselessly abuse her and take her for granted in order for us to continue our addiction to using fossil fuels. I've gotta say, I don't blame her. Not one bit.
Gloria ReubenIf an addict who has been completely cured starts smoking again he no longer experiences the discomfort of his first addiction. There exists, therefore, outside alkaloids and habit, a sense for opium, an intangible habit which lives on, despite the recasting of the organism. The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.
Jean CocteauI could have gone for gambling or sex addiction,...But I went for obesity because of the tremendous impact it has.
Nora VolkowNot everybody is comfortable with the idea that politics is a guilty addiction. But it is.
Hunter S. ThompsonEven if I remember the first time perfectly, I don't remember the beginning at all. I mean: the beginning of addiction. It's hard to say when it becomes a problem; it sneaks up on you like a sun shower.
Elizabeth WurtzelI'm fascinated by the whole issue of arousal addiction, which seems to be mostly a problem for young men.
Chuck PalahniukHere's how I became myself: mess, failure, mistakes, disappointments, and extensive reading; limbo, indecision, setbacks, addiction, public embarrassment, and endless conversations with my best women friends; the loss of people without whom I could not live, the loss of pets that left me reeling, dizzying betrayals but much greater loyalty, and overall, choosing as my motto William Blake's line that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love.
Anne LamottAs a literary device, sugar and pastry carried so many nuances - the sweetness of the past, the danger of overeating and addiction, the political and environmental devastation of plantations - it was just what a book needed.
Diana Abu-JaberUpgrade your addictions to the status of preferences. Here's the distinction between an addiction and a preference.
Ken Keyes Jr.I don't get really inspired the way some people do, buzzing with ideas - it feels like hard work to me... but once I get hooked into the universe of a particular work it becomes almost like an aesthetic addiction.
Shaun TanThat's it. With equal parts regret and relief, the Jane's Addiction experiment is at an end.
Eric AveryAddiction is a brain disease - this isn't a moral failing - and we have got to stop looking at it that way.
Perri PeltzEven if nonpolluting power were feasible and abundant, the use of energy on a massive scale acts on society like a drug that is physically harmless but psychically enslaving. A community can choose between Methadone and "cold turkey"-between maintaining its addiction to alien energy and kicking it in painful cramps-but no society can have a population that is hooked on progressively larger numbers of energy slaves and whose members are also autonomously active.
Ivan IllichTo limit yourself to a label of "alcoholic" is masochistic and false if you have awakened a deeper spiritual identity within and have come to know your true self as unconditioned pure awareness. This doesn't mean that recovering alcoholics don't have to be concerned with relapsing, they must always remain vigilant. The power of addiction should not be underestimated. This exercise in vigilance can become a spiritual tool of liberation as well. Always being aware of choosing between real happiness and false happiness is also the discrimination required to attain enlightenment.
Deepak ChopraAll patients reported a loss of craving for drugs while taking large doses of Vitamin C, during detoxification. Of the first 30 carefully monitored heroin addicts, 30 successfully withdrew from their addiction with no more than minor discomfort. None of the 30 were reported to have relapsed...Similar results have been reported by other doctors...:Archie Kalokerinos.
Irwin StoneWe may think there is willpower involved, but more likely... change is due to want power. Wanting the new addiction more than the old one. Wanting the new me in preference to the person I am now.
George A. SheehanSaigon was an addicted city, and we were the drug: the corruption of children, the mutilation of young men, the prostitution of women, the humiliation of the old, the division of the family, the division of the country-it had all been done in our name. . . . The French city . . . had represented the opium stage of the addiction. With the Americans had begun the heroin phase.
James FentonWith the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, more people will have insurance coverage and, in principle, be eligible for more care.
Thomas R. InselWhile the Internet generally tends to have a stress-relieving function for adults - as long as they aren't inclined toward sex addiction - I don't see this being the case for adolescents.
Volkmar SiguschThere is no life to be found in violence. Every act of violence brings us closer to death. Whether it's the mundane violence we do to our bodies by overeating toxic food or drink or the extreme violence of child abuse, domestic warfare, life-threatening poverty, addiction, or state terrorism.
Bell HooksNow we are all learning what it's like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence... Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and - now - Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.We can no longer continue feeding our addiction to fossil fuels as if there is no tomorrow. For there will be no tomorrow.
Desmond TutuPeople don't get that being a musician is a job, they don't get what the work takes. And that's just because you're living a dream, so everyone who's observing it from the outside can't really empathize with how much work it is because you're fortunate. And it's a kind of competition with yourself to stay away from all of the excess, whether it's booze or drugs or just the late nights with the addiction to watching the sun rise in some weird part of the world. But when you meet the other musicians, there's generally a spiritual exhaustion that you connect with.
Kevin DrewI learned early on that war forms its own culture. The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by mythmakers- historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists, and the state- all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty.
Chris HedgesIt's a spiritual malnutrition tied to a moral constipation, where people have a sense of what's right and what's good. It's just stuck, and they can't get it out because there's too much greed. There's too much obsession with reputation and addiction to narrow conceptions of success.
Cornel WestOnstage it was always comfortable for me because that's where I felt at home. Offstage it was a different situation. I was still shy offstage and unfortunately, my shyness and my inability to communicate and really have great conversations or be part of the gang - in inverted commas - led me to the drug addiction, which, you know, blighted my life for 16 years because I thought by doing that it would make me join in.
Elton John