Quotes About Addiction

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.

I do think, as crazy as it sounds, that sports is an addiction and that it should be accorded some of the same supports as any other addiction.

Addiction is a disease of exposure. Doctors and nurses, for instance, have a high addiction rate.

Any physical addiction, it doesn't matter how long they've been taking it or how full of it their body is, and addiction, would, between three and thirty days, be completely cleared from the system. Usually closer to three days than thirty days. But it is the emotional craving that must be tended to.

At every stage, addiction is driven by one of the most powerful, mysterious, and vital forces of human existence. What drives addiction is longing--a longing not just of brain, belly, or loins but finally of the heart.

If 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.

Don'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.

I have family members who literally struggle with crack addiction, and I've seen how destructive that's been, not only for their relationships and their children and their career, but perpetually even until today because that meant that that person was not there all these years to raise their child and just the damage that it inflicts.

Addiction is when you fall in love with a drug instead of a child or a lover and the learning that takes part in that part of the brain is designed by evolution to get us to persist despite negative consequences to do what we need to do - because I don't know anybody who could survive a relationship or parenting if not for the ability to persist despite negative consequences. The problem is when that gets misdirected to a drug and then you can find yourself in some very negative and potentially deadly situations.

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.

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.

Addiction has the capacity to disconnect the human will and nullify moral agency. It can rob one of the power to decide.

We have tax revenue that's going to allow us to look in a much more comprehensive way at intervening in addiction.

Addiction struggle is believing you are separate from love. It took me a long time to glimpse that.

I was happier when pursuing success than I was when savoring its fruits; the attraction, perhaps the addiction, was in the process, as much as in its end.

Tennis is an addiction that once it has truly hooked a man will not let him go.

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.

Exercise is like an addiction. Once you're in it, you feel like your body needs it.

Footbal 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.

I grew up in traditional black patriarchal culture and there is no doubt that I’m going to take a great many unconscious, but present, patriarchal complicities to the grave because it so deeply ensconced in how I look at the world. Therefore, very much like alcoholism, drug addiction, or racism patriarchy is a disease and we are in perennial recovery and relapse. So you have to get up every morning and struggle against it.

To break our addiction to oil is one of the greatest challenges that our generation will have to master.

Opioid replacement therapy is the standard evidence-based model to treat people with acute opioid addiction, and that is unassailable according to every research study that's been done. If that is the evidence-based model, then why can't we meet the large-scale need that's out there? We can't because one, there aren't enough doctors who can prescribe [drugs like methadone], and two, there are these artificial limits [by insurers] on who doctors can prescribe to.

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.

Stand-up, for me, is really more of an addiction, so you have to feed the beast whenever you can.

One of the problems we have is that we cannot just be content to admire and enjoy, we have to possess and feel we own what we see. That can become for many of us an addiction which adds a complication to our life and takes away our peace of mind. Craving things becomes after a while a serious distraction and an obsession.

[Banks] have a clear obligation to help get this country off its addiction to debt because they sure as hell helped to get this country addicted to debt.

Whenever you feel upset, take full responsibility for the emotions that you are experiencing. Get to work as quickly as possible identifying the programming, or the addiction, that is leading you to reject what other people are saying or doing.

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

The abused child goes on living within those who have survived such torture, a torture that ended with total repression. They live with the darkness of fear, oppression, and threats. When all its attempts to move the adult to heed its story have failed, it resorts to the language of symptoms to make itself heard. Enter addiction, psychosis, criminality.

Life without oil, in fact, would be so different that it is frightening to contemplate. We are addicted, and it is no comfortable addiction.

Making money is certainly the one addiction I cannot shake.

We did decide that every addict in this film, Warning: This Drug May Kill You, would be someone who started out with a prescription for an opioid from a doctor. The story that hadn't been told is that the vast majority - somewhere around 80 percent - of current heroin users began with an addiction to prescription opioids. So as much as people might want to look at this and say, 'Oh this is really a heroin problem,' yes, it is a heroin problem, and no one is saying differently, but it starts more often than not with a prescription.

She didn't love him and he didn't love her; she was like an addiction, and what they were doing had a darkness to it, a weight.

The difference between passion and addiction is that between a divine spark and a flame that incinerates.

She goes from one addiction to another. All are ways for her to not feel her feelings.

Soon you start craving that intense attention with the hungry obsession of any junkie. When the drug is withheld you probably turn sick, crazy and depleted not to mention resentful of the dealer who encourage this addiction in the first place but who now refuses to pony up the good stuff anymore despite that you know that he has it hidden somewhere God dammit because you know that he used to give it to you for free.

There is no error, no addiction with more power than the Cross of Christ.

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.

Racism is still America's greatest addiction. I also believe that America is the greatest sin against God.

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?

As 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.

These disorders - schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, depression, addiction - they not only steal our time to live, they change who we are.

I don't drink, I don't smoke, I don't do drugs... my addiction is wrestling - my obsession is competition.

The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree marks an arrested development in man's moral nature.

The Drug War is an addiction, really.

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.

It's time to transition beyond our fossil fuel addiction to a just economy based on green jobs, renewable energy, and local organic food.

Life is a series of baby steps along the way and if you add up these tiny little steps you take toward your goal, whatever it is, whether it's giving up something, a terrible addiction or trying to work your way through an illness. When you total up those baby steps you'd be amazed over the course of 10 years, the strides you've taken.