Quotes About Addiction

I felt that if people understood the struggle of recovery, then some of the stigma of addiction might be reduced because the audience would understand in a palpable way that addiction is a disease that tells the afflicted, despite years or even decades of heartbreaking evidence to the contrary, that using will make things better.

My bulimia was my addiction. Hurting myself was my addiction... The music is what saved me. That's the only thing I can trust.

In a storm of struggles, I have tried to control the elements, clasp the fist tight so as to protect self and happiness. But stress can be an addiction, and worry can be our lunge for control, and we forget the answer to this moment is always yes because of Christ.

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?

[Addiction's] not about placating the bad dog - it's about feeding the good dog. You still have to feed the bad dog, but only enough so that the ASPCA doesn't bring you up on charges.

What has drug addiction done for me? It's cost me my career, my fortune and basically my sex life when I found out I was HIV positive.

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.

Help me give up my addiction to Hope.

For a while, I had this uncontrollable urge - this addiction to danger. Now I look back and I think, 'Gee, what an idiot. I was risking my life just for the sensation of it.'

Some are addicted to cigarettes, some, God forbid, to drugs, and some become addicted to money. They say that the worst addiction is to power. I have never felt that. I have never been addicted to anything

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

Liberating oneself from the addiction of consumerism and careerism promotes inner peace.

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.

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.

All the suffering, stress, and addiction comes from not realizing you already are what you are looking for.

For me, addiction comes down to basically where a pattern of behaviour has developed and that pattern of behaviour is becoming a very damaging cycle. It's sort of damaging your relationships, friends or lovers, it's damaging your own personal health and it's damaging for you and your workplace.

So to me, what the drugs and addiction are saying is that I deserve to feel good, I'm allowed to take this because look how I was treated as a child. Our authority figures, particularly our parents are hypnotic. Their words are hypnotic literally to small children because of brain wave patterns.

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.

Each and every child in this country is valuable because they are our future as a society. We cannot afford to lose a single child to ill-health, under-education, abuse, addiction, jail, or gun violence. America's highest goal should be for every child to grow up to be a successful young adult -- healthy, educated, free, secure, and a good citizen.

Making money is certainly the one addiction I cannot shake.

Now there is apparently a causal link between heroin addiction and vegetarianism.

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.

Our president's latest energy initiative was to go to Saudi Arabia and beg King Abdullah to give us a little relief on gasoline prices. I guess there was some justice in that. When you, the president, after 9/11, tell the country to go shopping instead of buckling down to break our addiction to oil, it ends with you, the president, shopping the world for discount gasoline.

Slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.

A lot of addiction actually ends by age 30 - something like 50 percent of all addictions with the exception of tobacco - and I think a lot of what's going on there is that the self-control areas of the brain are finally developed enough to be able to stop yourself from relapsing or just continuing. There is a maturational aspect to it as well.

I went public with the alcoholism, very early on... the early '70s. Mercedes McCambridge, the actress, I think was the first recognizable person that went before Congress and talked about it, and I thought that was a good idea, to take some of the stigma away from it and say "Normal, average people can fall prey to it." So it's been public for me. I did a movie about an alcoholic. And today, you're nobody unless you've been to rehab. It seems like everybody has some kind of an addiction.

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

The very wealthy and the very famous have a much closer affinity with the indigent street person than with the rest of us. There's the narcissism, the addiction, even the outlandish dress. Often they don't put great value in relationships.

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

Addiction is not just for bad people or scumbags - it's a universal disease.

This is the 21st century, we are a highly evolved race, our capabilities are so great compared to what we are doing. We have been lulled into addiction and everything is built around it and you have to break out of it and think outside of the box.

Unhealthy cultures create addiction. Healthy cultures create social bonds.

Money doesn't mind if we say it's evil, it goes from strength to strength. It's a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.

I had a Velcro wallet in a casino. That sound annoyed the hell out of me. Whenever I lost money, and I opened the wallet, it was like the sound of my addiction.

A lot of people think that addiction is a choice. A lot of people think it's a matter of will. That has not been my experience. I don't find it to have anything to do with strength.

There 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.

Now 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.

I need those nukes, the chief said. I need them, I need them right now. I don't want to be an enabler, sir. I'd rather get you into a twelve step program to help you break this addiction.

Addiction - When you can give up something any time, as long as it's next Tuesday.

In the gay world, some of the most enriching and incredibly life-affirming and shaping relationships, very often between younger boys and older men, can be hugely positive experiences for those young boys. They can save those young boys from desolation, suicide and drug addiction, all sorts of things, providing they're consensual.

Sugar is more present in America or England than it is in France. I think there is an addiction to sweetness.

My mouth is no prayer book, but my view is, I'd view addiction to these substances as a medical problem and I would treat it accordingly. What little I know about the history of drug control policy in the United States leaves me thinking that a hugely important moment came when the lawyers win out over the doctors on this matter.

People don't want the truth. Everybody knows that heard what I said in that monologue about our culture's 'addiction to perfection' and how it started and where it's sustained - movies and television and so forth - knows that it's the truth.

People say what distinguishes us from the animals is that we think. Well, then why the hell don't we extend some compassion to those under tremendous duress? There's this whole idea that you work really hard so you can deaden your soul to the universe and enjoy yourself only in ways the Sierra Club will let you. But what about enjoying yourself by getting into the whole melee of poverty and racism and violence and murder and drug addiction? Get in there, roll up your sleeves, and do something! Nobody does it.

You don't need to hide the fact that you're in recovery, but you don't have to share your history of addiction with acquaintances at work, either.

An addiction is anything we do to avoid hearing the messages that body and soul are trying to send us.

I admire anyone who rids himself of an addiction.