Quotes About Addiction

Work addiction seems to be an addiction we are proud of. We almost seem to brag with mock displeasure that we are "overwhelmed" with busyness, sometimes as an excuse for not really being able to do what we really want to be doing. Work addiction is a symptom not of working your brains out but of your brain working you out. Why are you doing what you're doing for a career and how do you like doing it? Do you like your answer?

One way we could describe the struggle of life would be to say it is a battle between agency and addiction. Agency is our power to choose, and addiction is what happens when we have lost that power and we are controlled by something else.

It's an addiction... and addiction is something I should know something about.

The 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.

I just think the whole disease model of addiction is crap. It's rooted in fiction and junk science.

Through Nic's drug addiction, I have learned that parents can bear almost anything....I shock myself with my ability to rationalize and tolerate things once unthinkable. The rationalizations escalate....It's only marijuana. He gets high only on weekends. At least he's not using hard drugs.

We need to take a hard look at the war on drugs and the number of non-violent offenders who end up getting their lives destroyed by going to prison. We need to look at mandatory minimum sentencing and give judges more flexibility when there are issues of drug abuse or addiction.

Hope is something really tough and tenacious you have to give up. It’s an addiction to break.

If friends are taking more from you than they're giving, it doesn't matter if they are in the throes of addiction. It does not matter if they are suicidal. It does not matter if they were nice to you when you were kids. It doesn't matter if you've told them things you've never told anybody else and only they can relate. If this person is draining you, this person is not right for you.

I've always been very open about it. I've been very open about my addiction, about my panic disorder. But I think that transparency is what can separate you from others because I think that is where comedy is going.

We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.

All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.

What my true addiction is is reading. I love to read. If I'd get too loaded, I couldn't remember the sentence I just read.

I have to admit, I have a little sad addiction. I love watching on the E Channel that stupid show, The Girls Next Door. It's a very sad thing to say and I don't know how to explain it but I am addicted to Hugh Hefner's girlfriends and The Girls Next Door.

Theodore Dalrymple is a brilliant observer of both medicine and society, and his book wittily engages with two versions of the current nonsense: orthodox medicine on drug addiction, and romantic poets on the wisdom you supposedly enjoy from getting high.

Romantic love is an addiction.

We have turned doctors into gods and worship their deity by offering up our bodies and our souls - not to mention our worldly goods. And yet paradoxically, they are the most vulnerable of human beings. Their suicide rate is eight times the national average. Their percentage of drug addiction is one hundred times higher And because they are painfully aware that they cannot live up to our expectations, their anguish is unquantifiably intense. They have aptly been called 'wounded healers.' " ~ Barney Livingston, M.D. (Doctors, 1989)

It's been so long since I've really truly felt what it's like to live life without substances to help. Massive struggle that's natural to one's health, but with addiction in my blood I play the cards I was dealt.

Most memoirs about alcoholism, promiscuity, and addiction are deep, sobering tales full of scars that will never heal and include alarming statistics and reflection about recovery.This is not one of those memoirs.

For a decade Americans have been steeped in the rhetoric of "zero tolerance" and the faith that virtually all problems from drug addiction to lousy teaching can be solved by pouring on the punishment. Even without a Commander in Chief who pledges to rid the world of evildoers, smoke them out of their holes and the like, we would be vulnerable to the temptation to brush aside frustrating complexities and relieve intolerable fear (at least for the moment) by settling on one or more scapegoats to crush. To imagine that trauma casts out fantasy is a dangerous mistake.

I have a lot of friends who come from alcoholic families, and they aren't alcoholics, because someone explained it to them. When I was in Washington DC, they really talked about the difference statistically between families that talk about drug addiction and ones that don't. The kids that can say "I see where this is going" have a much better chance of not becoming addicts, because they have been educated.

As you feel increasingly comfortable around your friends, I think it's more than fine to share the basic details of your heroin addiction with them. If they seem receptive, you can feel free to talk about it in further detail; if they seem judgmental or uncomfortable, you can move on to other topics.

In the short term, corporal punishment may produce obedience. But it is a fact documented by research that in the long term the results are inability to learn, violence and rage, bullying, cruelty, inability to feel another's pain, especially that of one's own children, even drug addiction and suicide, unless there are enlightened or at least helping witnesses on hand to prevent that development.

Love's like a junkie, addiction's a fact. Passion's a monkey, you can't keep off your back.

If I, in some small way can help people to see that there is this huge, incredible life on the other side of addiction, you know, I will feel accomplished in my job.

You're an addiction...my obsession.

No-strings relationships have helped cure me of love addiction. All my life I've been in long-term monogamous relationships. I had to break that pattern by not allowing myself to have a relationship for a year, stopping myself from committing to men. I haven't been celibate. I've had lots of dates and lots of sex, but I haven't been pushing to turn a date into a relationship. This has been a huge thing for me.

Of what use is the universe? What is the practical application of a million galaxies? Yet just because it has no use, it has a use - which may sound like a paradox, but is not. What, for instance, is the use of playing music? If you play to make money, to outdo some other artist, to be a person of culture, or to improve your mind, you are not really playing - for your mind is not on the music. You don't swing. When you come to think of it, playing or listening to music is a pure luxury, an addiction, a waste of valuable time and money for nothing more than making elaborate patterns of sound.

I know in my soul when something feels like a sell out and I think for me, I knew that if I did the Jane's Addiction reunion thing, that I would feel like a sell out. That's how it would feel to me.

Friends with benefits? More than friends? Don't sample the goodies unless you're willing to risk addiction and withdrawal.

There is a yearning that is as spiritual as it is sensual. Even when it degenerates into addiction, there is something salvageable from the original impulse that can only be described as sacred. Something in the person (dare we call it a soul?) wants to be free, and it seeks its freedom any way it can. ... There is a drive for transcendence that is implicit in even the most sensual of desires.

Not everybody is comfortable with the idea that politics is a guilty addiction. But it is.

The feeling of righteousness is the core mood alteration among religious addicts. Religious addiction is a massive problem in our society. It may be the most pernicious of all addictions because it’s so hard for a person to break his delusion and denial. How can anything be wrong with loving God and giving your life for good works and service to mankind?

When you get into recovery after some addiction you have to relearn a lot of perceptions, attitudes and self-awareness if you want to stay clean. You really do change. Change doesn't happen often but to a certain extent in some way, I think when you get into recovery and you stay there, you change.

I got addicted to the addiction book. I actually started developing all the addictions of the people in the book that I was writing about, without realizing it.

It's all about choices! You choose, you make the rules, not tobacco companies, not addiction

We've always had a tradition in America of hounding our artists to death. Look at the list of our great artists, you see a continual history of defeat, frustration, poverty, alcoholism, drug addiction. The best poets of my generation are all suicides.

Addiction is the dominant form of a culture that suffers from a superficial spectacle and celebrity-connectivity at its center. It's a form of spiritual emptiness.

Yes, creative people are more prone to addiction or addictive behavior. But, equally as prone is your mailman, your mother, your brother, your friend, the guy who does your banking. It's everywhere. The thing that happens in the press sometimes is Whitney Houston. She was just an addict. Just like your uncle Steve.

Recovery is a bit like an addiction; you take it day by day. If you set yourself too many goalposts, you'll have problems.

Drug addicts, when they are in their addiction, are selfish.

Addiction is a brain disease - this isn't a moral failing - and we have got to stop looking at it that way.

Drug addiction is an evil, and with evil there can be no yielding or compromise.

For many, the regressive belief in superstitions and miracles is an escape from the hardships of life. Once trapped into irrationalism, they become more incapable of mastering reality. It is a vicious circle, like an addiction. They become vulnerable to exploitation by astrologers, godmen, dubious pseudo-psychologists, corrupt politicians and the whole mega-industry of irrationalism.

To 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.

All 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.

Saigon 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.

Another California study counted 30,000 substance abusers who are pregnant are White woman. So, The Wire paints the picture of drug addiction, drug dealing, and drug abuse as being a specifically a Black issue.