Quotes About Addiction

Once and for all, people must understand that addiction is a disease. It’s critical if we’re going to effectively prevent and treat addiction. Accepting that addiction is an illness will transform our approach to public policy, research, insurance, and criminality; it will change how we feel about addicts, and how they feel about themselves. There’s another essential reason why we must understand that addiction is an illness and not just bad behavior: We punish bad behavior. We treat illness.

It seemed that the problem of Americans overdosing and dying from drug addiction was being described as bad people, particularly kids, who were abusing good drugs. But Sheila Nevins, the president of HBO Documentary Films, and I were particularly interested in finding out the stories of people and families who had been ravaged by this disease of addiction and understanding what really was happening. What we found was that, and let's not make any mistake about it, this is an epidemic of addiction.

The opposite of addiction is human connection. And I think that has massive implications for the war on drugs. The treatment of drug addicts almost everywhere in the world is much closer to Tent City than it is to anything in Portugal. Our laws are built around the belief that drug addicts need to be punished to stop them. But if pain and trauma and isolation cause addiction, then inflicting more pain and trauma and isolation is not going to solve that addiction. It's actually going to deepen it.

All I've ever done is work in bars and be a wrestler; I often wonder if I'd have pumped gas, would I have been a womanizer and had addiction problems?

Showing the addiction and unusual sexual practices are ways of just outlining a much bigger character trait.

Practically every environmental problem we have can be traced to our addiction to fossil fuels, primarily oil.

The priesthood holds consummate power. It can protect you from the plague of pornography-and it is a plague-if you are succumbing to its influence. If one is obedient, the priesthood can show how to break a habit and even erase an addiction. Holders of the priesthood have that authority and should employ it to combat evil influences.

We often say 'love' when we really mean, and are acting out, an addiction-a sterile, ingrown dependency relationship, with another person serving as the object of our need for security.

The moment we shake our addiction to narrative and give up our strong-headed intent that language must say something "meaningful," we open ourselves up to different types of linguistic experience, which could include sorting and structuring words in unconventional ways: by constraint, by sound, by the way words look, and so forth, rather than always feeling the need to coerce them toward meaning.

We have seen what the dependence and addiction to foreign oil has done to us economically.

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.

The worst thing you can do for your loved one caught in alcoholism or addiction is to help the person continue in the deception that he or she is OK. Your best course of action is to speak the truth in love (see Eph. 4:15) and don't allow him or her to escape the consequences of wrong behavior.

. . . word-sniffing . . . is an addiction, like glue -- or snow -- sniffing in a somewhat less destructive way, physically if not economically. . . . As an addict, I am almost guiltily interested in converts to my own illness . . .

It took me a long time to reach the bottom and it went through various stages. I went from drugs into an alcohol stage. For a while, one feels, "Ah, I've kicked drugs," but what I discovered was I had another addiction instead.

The book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those literary counterparts to the opium den.

Enslavement to your own weakness - be it an addiction to alcohol, or to a woman or to fame - it's degrading, and it means losing your dignity and your freedom.

Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it.

Even when we get what we addictively want, our wanting to keep things that way automatically creates a new addiction.

When you refrain from habitual thoughts and behavior, the uncomfortable feelings will still be there. They don’t magically disappear. Over the years, I’ve come to call resting with the discomfort “the detox period,” because when you don’t act on your habitual patterns, it’s like giving up an addiction. You’re left with the feelings you were trying to escape. The practice is to make a wholehearted relationship with that

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.

Jesus Himself has already paid the price for your sins, so stop condemning yourself! Today, when you look into the mirror, what do you see? Do you see yourself trapped in all your failings, mistakes, and sins? Or do you see what God sees? My dear friend, when God sees you today, He sees Jesus. Use your eyes of faith and believe that as Jesus is, so are you. In God’s eyes, you are righteous, you are favored, you are blessed, and you are healed. You are freed from all sin, all pangs of guilt, all forms of condemnation, and every bondage of addiction!

A Rescuer isn't always a person. Addictions to alcohol or drugs, sexual addiction, workaholism-all the ways we numb out-can rescue the Victim from feeling his or her own feelings.

Writing is not a profession, it's an addiction.

Our present addiction to pollsters and forecasters is a symptom of our chronic uncertainty about the future... We watch our experts read the entrails of statistical tables and graphs the way the ancients watched their soothsayers read the entrails of a chicken.

We cannot drill our way out of our addiction to oil.

It's not just that we all as individuals should reevaluate our relationship with our devices - maybe you should, on a personal level - but in terms of balancing the micro and the macro and the personal and the structural, it's actually a bigger issue than you and your phone addiction.

All behavioral or mood disorders - including depression, OCD, ADHD and addiction - have some neurochemical components, but sufferers can still work to overcome them.

When someone tells me that they insist on having drinks with me, and there are some cultures where sealing the deal or celebrating or having a guest in the home, it is very traditional to slam down a couple shots or whatever the local grog is. I just tell them I'm allergic, which is not a lie, you know alcoholism and drug addiction in many ways are described as an allergy of the body and the mind. So I just tell them I'm allergic and they're like, "Oh, no problem."

I am convinced now that virtually every destructive behavior and addiction I battled off and on for years was rooted in my (well-earned) insecurity.

I love making people laugh. It's an addiction and it's probably dysfunctional, but I am addicted to it and there's no greater pleasure for me than sitting in a theater and feeling a lot of people losing control of themselves.

Too many young folk have addiction to superficial things and not enough conviction for substantial things like justice, truth and love.

For years I was so busy building walls I did not see I was imprisoning myself behind them, and did not recognize this pattern as being addiction. My addictive thinking and behavior became the bars of my cell. Denying feeling empty inside, I constantly looked for new things to acquire, people to be around, substances to take, and new goals to achieve in order to feel better about myself. Over the last four decades I have focused on healing my addictive mind and helping others do the same.

There is so much to life; my heart breaks watching someone held captive by addiction.

The only guy that speaks at any sort of depth is, in my mind, Eminem. He's a guy that does music that talks about the struggles of addiction and before that violence, with growing up in a broken family, not being a good enough father. So, you know that's what I enjoy about it. It's harder to listen to than ever before because I have a bunch of kids and you just can't put it on.

I have a little bit of an addiction to work. So I'm always hiding in the bathroom with my Blackberry to work when I'm on holiday.

When you're first in love with somebody, and it's not true love, it's borderline obsession, it's kind of like an addiction. You switch into this weird, weird part of your mind when you just can't live without that person. And you want to envelop them. You want them flowing through your veins.

You know you are addicted to a food if despite knowing it is bad for you and despite wanting to change, you still keep eating it. Addiction means that a craving has more control over your behavior than you do.

I was a big rugby player and into my motocross, so I lost loads of weight and a rumor went around the town that I had picked up a drug addiction!

Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.

In the late twentieth century, staying sober has become just as much an addiction as getting wasted.

It is time to end the discrimination against people who need treatment for chemical addiction. It is time for Congress to deal with our Nation's number one public health problem.

Pomegranate juice has staying power. It's not a fad. Once people have tasted POM Wonderful, they say they are addicted - and it's a good addiction to have.

You cannot cheat with the law of conservation of violence: all violence is paid for, and for example, the structural violence exerted by the financial markets, in the form of layoffs, loss of security, etc., is matched sooner or later in the form of suicides, crime and delinquency, drug addiction, alcoholism, a whole host of minor and major everyday acts of violence.

My major vice is sarcasm with a side of caffeine addiction.

At a glance, addiction, sex work, mad passion, and all forms of extreme behavior might look like pushing or trying to obliterate boundaries when, more honestly, they are a search for them. I want to find the endpoint, the place where my own powers end, so I can yield to something that I'm certain is bigger than me.

Because they are human beings, addicts long for wholeness, for fulfillment, and for the final good that believers call God. Like all idolatries, addiction taps this vital spiritual force and draws off its energies to objects and processes that drain the addict instead of fulfilling him.

Photography to me is an addiction. I get jittery after a couple of days without a camera. Everyone who knows me says I'm happiest when I'm shooting.

I 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.