#opium

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. ↗

— Karl Marx

#opium-of-the-people #religion #religion

Thought is a kind of opium; it can intoxicate us, while still broad awake; it can make transparent the mountains and everything that exists. ↗

— Henri Frederic Amiel

#broad #everything #exists #intoxicate #kind

It is not opium which makes me work but its absence, and in order for me to feel its absence it must from time to time be present. ↗

— Antonin Artaud

#feel #from time to time #makes #me #must

Religious suffering is at once the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of the heartless world, as it is the soul of soulless condition. It is the opium of the people. ↗

— John Desmond Bernal

#condition #creature #expression #heartless #once

Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, men have at all times, and in all countries, called in some physical aid to their moral consolations - wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco. ↗

— Edmund Burke

#beer #brandy #called #cares #condition

Many Chinese saw opium as a poison introduced by foreign enemies. ↗

— Robert Trout

#foreign #introduced #many #opium #poison

The East India Company established a monopoly over the production of opium, shortly after taking over Bengal. ↗

— Robert Trout

#company #east #established #india #monopoly

Religion is the opium of the people. He believed that, that dyspeptic little joint-keeper. Yes, and music is the opium of the people. Old mount-to-the-head hadn't thought of that. And now economics is the opium of the people; along with patriotism the opium of the people in Italy and Germany. What about sexual intercourse; was that an opium of the people? Of some of the people. Of some of the best of the people. But drink was a sovereign opium of the people, oh, an excellent opium. Although some prefer the radio, another opium of the people, a cheap one he had just been using. Along with these went gambling, an opium of the people if there ever was one, one of the oldest. Ambition was another, an opium of the people along with a belief in any new form of government. What you wanted was the minimum of government, always less government. Liberty, what we believed in, now the name of a MacFadden publication. We believed in that although they had not found a new name for it yet. But what was the real one? What was the real, the actual, opium of the people? He knew it very well. It was gone just a little way around the corner in that well-lighted part of his mind that was there after two or more drinks in the evening; that he knew was there (it was not really there of course). What was it? He knew very well. What was it? Of course; bread was the opium of the people. Would he remember that and would it make sense in the daylight? Bread is the opium of the people. ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#vice #music

In general I strive for greatness and rational achievement, but I admit to you I’ve a terrible fondness for women, a tendency towards drunkenness, and a weakness for the fumes of the poppy—opium and other miserable beauties. ↗

— Roman Payne

#drunkeness #greatness #heroin #opium #poppies

Junk turns the user into a plant. Plants do not feel pain since pain has no function in a stationary organism. Junk is a pain killer. A plant has no libido in the human or animal sense. Junk replaces the sex drive. Seeding is the sex of the plant and the function of opium is to delay seeding. Perhaps the intense discomfort of withdrawal is the transition from plant back to animal, from a painless, sexless, timeless state back to sex and pain and time, from death back to life. ↗

— William S. Burroughs

#junk #opium #pain #plant #seed