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Thoughts on Prohibition

Published: Sep 6, 2014 06:09:36 AM IST
Updated: Sep 4, 2014 11:12:32 AM IST
Thoughts on Prohibition
Image: Chaitanya Dinesh Surpur

Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.
WC Fields

Prohibition is better than no liquor at all.
Will Rogers

Prohibition makes you want to cry into your beer and denies you the beer to cry into.
Don Marquis

Prohibition didn’t work in the Garden of Eden. Adam ate the apple.
Vicente Fox

Prohibition is the trigger of crime.
Ian Fleming

Prohibition may be the greatest gift any government ever gave its citizens. A barrel of beer cost $4 to make and sold for $55. A case of spiritous liquor cost $20 to produce and earned $90—and all this without taxes.
Bill Bryson

Prohibition... goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes.
Abraham Lincoln

For every prohibition you create, you also create an underground.
Jello Biafra

Prohibition? HA! They tried that in the movies and it didn’t work.
Homer Simpson

Prohibition may be a disputed theory, but none can complain that it doesn’t hold water.
Tom Masson

The prohibition law, written for weaklings and derelicts, has divided the nation, like Gaul, into three parts...wets, drys, and hypocrites.
Florence Sabin

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
Upton Sinclair

(This story appears in the 19 September, 2014 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)

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