Top 171 Addiction Quotes

The disaster in the Gulf was no accident. It was the result of years of oil money buying off politicians to lead to an unregulated and ill focused addiction to oil and drilling. The doomed fate of the local fisherman and the environment were foretold in the infamous chants of ‘Drill, Baby, Drill.’

Addiction is a chronic disease of the brain and it’s one that we have to treat the way we would any other chronic illness: with skill, with compassion and with urgency.

It’s about avoiding reality through various escape routes that become addictions and lead to Hell. My character is addicted to television, chocolate, coffee, to her dream of her son, which has no basis in reality.

If your social media addiction comes between your relationship, you might want to quit.

Despite the previous efforts of Congresses, our addiction to foreign oil, as the President stated, is greater today than ever before. That dependency is a threat to our national security, and we must address that threat.

I have an iPhone, but that’s just because I need to take pictures of my 5- and 8 1/2-year-old kids. It becomes quite easily an addiction for people who aren’t even aware that they’re addicted.

Let us build a 21st-century rural economy of cutting-edge companies and technologies that lead us to energy and food security. Such an investment will revitalize rural America, re-establish our moral leadership on climate security and eliminate our addiction to foreign oil.

I’ve always thought legal addictions are a great way to create a business. Starbucks is a wonderful example.

I’m talking about some real subjects and issues in my standup. I’m attempting to make a point about technology and how it’s changing our society and our lives, and our addiction to social media, and how it affects marriages and relationships.

Comics are in my blood. It’s my strange addiction, and I love it.

We have all learned that addiction and mental illnesses are illnesses, and I think a lot of people overlook that it is a chemical imbalance; it’s like cancer, a sickness, and people need to see it as that.

When I have a creative insight, there is a high. I think back in the day, I made music as much as I did because it made me feel so good. I think you could argue that there is a creative addiction – but, you know, the healthy kind.

I knew it was against the rules to bet on football, but when you’ve got an addiction you just want to win that money back.

I have an addiction to caffeine.

If trees can create art, if they can encircle the globe seven times in one year, if prisoners can grow plants and raise frogs, then perhaps there are other static entities that we hold inside ourselves, like grief, like addictions, like racism, that can also change.

Although the Chinese had used opium as a medicine, there was no widespread addiction before the British arrived.

Human decision-making is complex. On our own, our tendency to yield to short-term temptations, and even to addictions, may be too strong for our rational, long-term planning.

We need to reduce or at least limit U.S. demand for oil as quickly as possible, and we need to develop new technologies that can further help address our addiction to oil in the future.

I am a professional sportswriter, among other things, and I take the games seriously. It is only one of my many powerful addictions, and I don’t mind admitting any of them.

I have a sugar addiction – when I don’t eat sugar, my body literally shakes. It’s not something I’m proud of.

I got freed of all of my addictions January 16, 2009, but at that point I didn’t do a full surrender to Jesus. I didn’t give a full surrender until February 18, 2017, so there’s quite a story in between where God was still chasing me.

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

It seems to me like Mother Nature’s mercy and forgiveness have run dry, as we ceaselessly abuse her and take her for granted in order for us to continue our addiction to using fossil fuels. I’ve gotta say, I don’t blame her. Not one bit.

Just like everybody else, celebrities have brains and those brains get conditions – addiction, depression.

While we wait for the scientific data to prove the harms of vaping, let’s protect our middle and high schoolers from a lifelong addiction and a high risk of cancer.

If you don’t have God in your life, you have to fill up on something. And you usually reach for the four great substitutes, the classical addictions: wealth, pleasure, power, and honor. So you try to fill yourself up.

Gollum is entirely based on the notion of addiction. The way that the ring pervades him, makes him craving, lustful, depletes him physically, psychologically and mentally.

I just hope by how I live my life every day that people can see there is another side to addiction. You can live with it and have a successful life.

One trait of addictive families is that we never recognize our own addictions.

A moderate addiction to money may not always be hurtful; but when taken in excess it is nearly always bad for the health.

Romantic love is an addiction.

Ottolenghi sells lots of delicious sweet things, but my daily addiction is their unbelievable dark chocolate salted caramel biscuits. They’re the best things in the world – I go through half a packet every night. I bring them out after pudding at dinner parties.

I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That’s the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about.

Being a manager is the closest buzz I’ll ever get to playing. For every low, you get a high, and that becomes an addiction and a feeling you are always chasing.

Unconditional love is so important for people with addiction.

Everybody has some kind of addiction. It’s about how you get around that addiction. First, you have to break the habit like anything. You have to define the hurdle or the objective.

What I’ve learned to do is arrest my addiction – arrest it myself, so I don’t get arrested.

The root causes of the gang culture lie right across the policy spectrum – but they can all be found in the same areas geographically: worklessness; family breakdown; educational failure and addiction.

Work is an addiction. I’ve always done too much. It’s in my nature.

Coffee and smoking are the last great addictions.

Meeting Perry Farrel was kind of cool. He’s such an icon, and I was such a fan of Jane’s Addiction.

I think golf is literally an addiction. I’m surprised there’s not Golf Anonymous.

In my family and in my community, I see people struggling with drug addiction, with poverty and the effects of generational poverty; I see people struggling with lack of access to healthcare.

From the beginning of my career, I’ve used makeup as a vehicle to express my vision, my obsessions, inspirations, and addictions. There’s nothing more rewarding than seeing young people recreate some of my iconic looks.

I have a chicken-wing addiction… I sometimes can’t get out of a restaurant without at least trying their chicken wings. So that’s my great downfall.

I love apple sauce. I have an addiction – I don’t know what it is, but I just love the texture of it. It reminds me of baby food. Not that I like to eat baby food.

Everyone likes to hear that their eccentricities and their addictions are simply evidence of their sensitive artistic nature.

I’ve struggled with depression in my life and sort of the way that the depression itself becomes an addiction.

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

Nothing good could ever have come of my life if I hadn’t been able to get therapy and overcome my addictions.

At school, I was only allowed four sweets every Wednesday, so I’ve developed an addiction.

I think I have an adrenaline addiction, no question about that.

Addiction is a really hard thing to kick.

Years of research in psychology has shown that rewards and punishments can be very effective in changing behavior. But, at the same time, they can create an addiction to rewards and punishments.

Americans’ addiction to sports, with the NFL at the top, is based on the excitement generated by the potential for the unexpected great play which can only happen with honest competition from great athletes.

The scary part of alcoholism and addiction and that is until a person is ready to stop, they’re not gonna, and there’s nothing anyone can do. There’s nothing anyone can say or do. And the unfortunate part is sometimes people die because of that.

Beneath all of these addictions is this disease, this control disease which is the mark of our society.

Habits can be good or bad, whereas addictions are always bad.

That desire to compete is almost a physical addiction.

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.

Drama can be an addiction. It’s so, so sneaky. Jealousy – all of those things can really send you in a lot of different crazy directions.

I have the obsessiveness of someone who’s a sober, recovering addict displacing his addiction. Except I never had the addiction.

I have made an art form of the interview. The French are the best interviewers, despite their addiction to the triad, like all Cartesians.

I started producing work with an ecstatic addiction.

I’ve got an addiction to this game. An addiction to being perfect.

I have a bit of a traveling addiction, and, ah, yeah. I went to, ah, Bali this summer.

It’s an addiction. I love clothes. I like to go down Melrose and look in all the windows and I go to different flea markets. I have lots of costumes. You never know when you’re going to have to dress up like a milkmaid from the 1600s.

I played basketball at Kentucky in 1986-87 and ’87-88 and enjoyed a 12-year NBA career. After multiple injuries and seven surgeries, I developed an addiction to prescription painkillers.

Everyone is connected to somebody with some type of addiction. It’s so ramped now. Everyone has an uncle, a cousin, somebody who has addiction. We all have addiction.

Not everybody is comfortable with the idea that politics is a guilty addiction. But it is.

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

Recovery Friendly Workplaces are an opportunity for New Hampshire to help change the culture around addiction by engaging employers in being a proactive part of the conversation by providing tools, resources, and opening up access to treatment.

Contemplation is an alternative consciousness that refuses to identify with or feed what are only passing shows. It is the absolute opposite of addiction, consumerism or any egoic consciousness.

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.’

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

With commitment and the right investments, we can create a San Francisco where no one is forced, relegated, or allowed to sleep on the streets, and where no one endures addiction or mental illness on the streets without supportive and effective services.

Trauma super charges addiction and makes it really bad. It doesn’t necessarily cause it, though it can trigger it. It’s not necessarily the issue but if you have bad addiction, it’s there.

I spend a lot of time unpacking the pain surrounding my addiction – both my own and the pain I caused other people.

You know, we think about addiction as a morally reprehensible choice, but addicts act crazy because, in a way, that they are.

I started to write in about 1950; I was thirty-five at the time; there didn’t seem to be any strong motivation. I simply was endeavoring to put down in a more or less straightforward journalistic style something about my experiences with addiction and addicts.

Though addiction is a disease – a brain disease that’s often progressive – addicts who relapse are often blamed.

This disease of addiction has touched not just me but millions of Americans out there. Me being in the spotlight, I want to tell my story because there are a lot of misconceptions. I want to let people out there know that there’s hope.

Addiction is a terrible thing.

I had always turned it down-to me, smoking pot was absolutely the worst thing in the world. I thought of it as an addiction, and all my friends who smoked it, I felt they really needed help.

For far too many people, the stigma around addiction prevents them from stepping forward for help.

We are taught to consume. And that’s what we do. But if we realized that there really is no reason to consume, that it’s just a mind set, that it’s just an addiction, then we wouldn’t be out there stepping on people’s hands climbing the corporate ladder of success.

Advocating for quality addiction treatment has become a passion, and it’s the most rewarding thing that someone like me can do. People were there to help me when I needed it, so I’ve made it my goal to pay it forward.

We must start 24/7 ERs dedicated to addiction and mental health.

Treatment of alcohol addiction can take many forms.

The thing about addiction is you think you’re getting off on people, and you’re not, and the only person you’re fooling is yourself.

This dark diction has become America’s addiction.

I’ve solved my phone addiction by deleting all the apps I was addicted to – email, browser – and getting my wife to add parental controls, to limit access even further.

Of course a striker wants to score as much as possible. It’s nice scoring goals. Goals are like an addiction: when you score, you want to keep doing more and more.

Poverty is about people lacking the tools they need to get on in life. And solving it is about tackling educational failure, antisocial behaviour, debt problems and addiction, and of course it’s about work.

I have a healthy addiction to binge-watching TV.

Addiction is a hugely complex and destructive disease, and its impact can be simply devastating. All too often, lives and families can be shattered by it.

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.

If all Henry Kissinger contributed to the Middle East were a regional arms race, petrodollar addiction, Iranian radicalization, and the Tehran-Riyadh conflict, it would be bad enough. His legacy, however, is far worse than that: He has to answer for his role in the rise of political Islam.

Working together with Democrats and Republicans, I passed legislation to help break the grip of addiction. By investing in prevention, treatment, and recovery, empowering law enforcement, and stopping the overprescribing of painkillers, we can turn the tide.

In the midst of all our emotional upheaval caused by ambition, aggression, rejection, transition, addiction, limitation and competition, the one thing that remains constant within us is our deep desire to be happy.

My relationship with the ‘Baby-Sitters Club’ series bordered on addiction, and my mom got me heavily into the Trixie Belden mysteries as well. Trixie Belden was like Nancy Drew, but without the boyfriends and cute outfits, which I think is the reason my mother preferred her.

I understand the world of addiction. I get it. I know how fleeting recovery can be.

I’m always very stressed about making a new proposition every season. But in a way, it’s a kind of addiction.

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

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.

My father left when I was really young, but he’s still living. There are things I wish I’d said that I didn’t and I don’t think I’ll ever get the opportunity to say. He’s battled addiction problems his entire life. I wish things were different. I wish there were a way my son could know him, know the good parts of him.

For decades the American people have had an addiction to oil and gas.

I’m calling for a cultural change in how we think about addiction. For far too long people have thought about addiction as a character flaw or a moral failing.

Those who have to struggle with addiction in their lives know the ‘you only live once’ mentality doesn’t really work because you can only do that for so often before you’re self-destructive.

Most people have had that feeling of like, being obsessed with someone, and losing self control a bit, and that hopefully humanises addiction a bit.

I’m a former bulimic myself and it’s a horrible, horrible addiction.

If someone is told they have depression or addiction, why don’t we allow them the same compassion and time for healing as if they were diagnosed with high blood pressure or diabetes? These are all illnesses for which treatment exists and recovery is possible.

Addiction’s some kind of disease? No, it’s not. It’s a mask for pain that usually comes from childhood and fatherlessness.

Method involves a slavish addiction to laws, and we can only aspire to anarchy.

Marijuana is a much bigger part of the American addiction problem than most people – teens or adults – realize.

There is definitely an addiction to money that I have.

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.

The way people get hooked on fame… it can behave very much like an addiction.

We’ve observed that people who stall in their personal growth work often have counterproductive soft addictions that stand in their way of growth and having the life they say they want. It can be a simple thing, such as watching TV instead of finishing a project.

I kind of have a strange addiction to hair dryers. Like on the TV show, where they eat toilet paper or eat the wall or something – I’m addicted to hair dryers. Since I was 8 years old, I’ve used them to fall asleep. I love the white noise. I love the heat. It just puts me right to sleep.

In love addiction that experience of: ‘Oh my God, I’m in love… I feel whole, and I feel like I’ve known this person forever.’ That is a feeling that you have to have all the time. You become addicted to it.

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.

Anything that you can become obsessed with, and you do so much that you don’t do the things you need to do with family, friends, school, job – that can be an addiction. And texting absolutely can qualify.

I trust my recovering peers completely. I’ll occasionally look sideways at them because they’re addicts but it would break my heart and surprise me to find out that any of these people were lying. Still, addiction is cunning and baffling and you never know.

I really love to act; I love everything about it. I’ve never had this addiction to being known. I mean, sure, if you go into acting, there’s part of you that is saying, ‘I want attention’ but I was brought up to work to deserve attention, and it is the work, not the trappings that are important.

If a child had another disease, we’d be open about what we were going through, but addiction is stigmatised and comes with shame and guilt.

Since beginning my work in areas like addiction, for example, I have seen time and time again that the roots of poor mental health in adulthood are almost always present in unresolved childhood challenges.

I think we need to educate our doctors about addiction.

I’ve triumphed over addiction.

I was in my mid-40s. I was a bulimic, and I realized if I continue with this addiction of mine, I will not be able to continue doing my life. The older you get the more damage it does; it takes longer to recover from a binge. And it was very hard.

MySpace is an addiction.

Well, addiction does start with a choice.

America’s addiction to violence is partly evident in the heroes it chooses to glorify.

My mother, Marnie Fahr Steyer, was a lifelong smoker – up to three packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day. I like to think that, if Mom were still with us today, she’d be happy with the strides we’ve made to protect our children from the ongoing health crisis of tobacco addiction.

Addiction is a crazy disease. It’s a progressive disease when it’s not dealt with; it don’t care who it takes, and it takes it all. You wind up losing your house, your home, your reputation.

Addiction has a worse prognosis than most cancers. I tell someone they have cancer and they want to be airlifted to a cancer treatment center; I tell someone they have an addiction and they’re going to die and they want to argue with me about the treatment.

That’s what we were exploring on ‘Larry Sanders’ – the human qualities that have brought us to where we are now in the world: the addiction to needing more and wanting more and talking more. We were examining the labels put on success – is it successful to be on TV every day, to be famous, to have a paycheck?

Working and being involved in multiple businesses and fixing things has almost turned into an addiction, but I can’t seem to want to change it.

When the President was asked about global warming at a public appearance yesterday, he responded by talking about America’s addiction to oil. You make the connection.

I have a writing addiction.

Dramas about addiction can be exciting to watch. And then dispiriting. Exciting because degradation is fascinating to follow from the relative safety and smugness of an ‘appropriate’ life, and dispiriting because if all that sad mayhem can happen to this or that character, what’s to keep it from happening to me or you?

Everybody tells you over and over again that addiction is a disease. But when I read Nic’s book I understood not just that this is a disease, but what the disease means.

I think a lot of people feel shame when they revisit their years of addiction.

I had an addiction to play baseball.

I have always enjoyed vampire stuff without ever having been a full vampire geek. I suppose I love the idea of blood thirst because it can say so much about us, not simply about addiction but about all those desires that can tear a family apart.

In college – while figuring the things out that most people do in college – I had no game. No confidence. I had Birkenstocks. And overalls. A budding romance novel addiction. But no cool. No poise. I was trying on a thousand different personalities, but a lot of them were formed by the perceptions of others.

I started stealing in ninth grade. And I don’t mean a pack of gum from the convenience store here and there. I mean stealing on the regular. It got really bad. It was one hundred percent an addiction.

I don’t own a watch anymore. Literally, that was an addiction. I’m not afraid to admit that. It took me over. My possessions possessed me.

No one is immune from addiction; it afflicts people of all ages, races, classes, and professions.

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

Americans struggling with addiction need treatment and reduced access to deadly drugs.

Smoking sucks! The one thing I would say to my kid is, ‘It’s not just that it’s bad for you. Do you want to spend the rest of your life fighting a stupid addiction to a stupid thing that doesn’t even really give you a good buzz?’

Prohibition of substances which give pleasure to people does not work. Addiction is a health problem, not a moral one, and there are many proven strategies which can reduce its burden.

Sometimes, when I hear people without experience of addiction blame addicts for their behaviour, I feel like saying to them: ‘You simply don’t understand – how can a child be held responsible for doing such a dreadful thing to himself?’ But then again, at other times I have to acknowledge: it was done wilfully.

I do a lot of book signings and conventions every year, and I meet a great many readers who are struggling… they’re working through illness, injury, addiction, depression, grief, or some other trauma. It seems to me that there’s a lot of heroism in fighting those things as well, as best you can.

Childhood trauma is really what puts the rocket fuel behind addiction.

For me, addiction exposes all of the brain mechanism under the influence of a profoundly distorted primary motivation. It’s such a window into how we function as human beings. And the patient doesn’t know that’s happening! Doesn’t believe that’s happening! That’s the fascinating part.

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

Religious work is one of the best ways to keep from facing your reality if you are Christian, if you are using it to calm the pain, because that it what all addictions are, attempts to cover the pain of this spiritual disease.

Yemen is a symbol of our continued military hubris in the Middle East – an addiction Obama was supposed to cure but didn’t.

Addiction isn’t about substance – you aren’t addicted to the substance, you are addicted to the alteration of mood that the substance brings.

Anybody who’s dealt with addiction and depression knows that sometimes they can make you forget who you are and kind of bring out a different person, somebody you don’t know as well.

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.

My obsession with hip-hop has given me an addiction to trainers, which are very much a young person’s game, and I am known to rock a full tracksuit, under the pretence that it’s more comfortable to travel in.

It is kind of a strange thing when you face things in your life, you know like addictions, that often you will find that you will deal with it a little bit but then you will slip back into old ways.

Cellphones are very addictive. Even if one goes to rehab to get rid of this addiction, it’s not going to work.

The end of my addiction to fame happened at the exact moment ‘Roseanne’ dropped out of the top ten, in the seventh of our nine seasons. It was mysteriously instantaneous!

When I was at school, I wanted to join the army. At college, I started acting in college plays, and it became a kind of addiction. I was very shy when I was at school, but the plays seemed to give voice to my feelings.

‘Moonlight’ isn’t an issue film. It’s not about addiction, it’s not about sexuality, it’s not about identity. It’s about all these different layers, because they are all a part of the character.

You can change a person’s life in an instant; put him in a movie, and you start thinking differently, you want to be in another movie. It’s like an addiction almost.

‘In Another Time’ talks about our addiction to technology.