“People who are given opiates after operations — sometimes for days — do not become addicts in the sense that I’m talking about. Moreover, it’s been shown that heroin addicts have to make considerable efforts — in other words to be determined — to become addicts, and addicted; and on average it takes them about a year or so. In other words, heroin does not hook them, they hook heroin. And this, I think should suggest, is a typical example of the way that when we think about social problems, or the way many of us think about social problems, we ascribe agency not to agents but to inanimate objects and substances, and forces.”

“[On Sid Vicious] Yes I can take on England, but I couldn't take on one heroin addict.”

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

“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.”

“Having seen the destruction of alcoholism and heroin addiction in my own family that makes me pretty intolerant of people who are willing to destroy the people around them to indulge themselves.”

“Doctors try to get rid of their patients — clergymen try to get them hooked on the medicine so that they will become addicts to the church.”

“Incidentally, many thousands of American servicemen addicted themselves to heroin in Vietnam, but two years after their repatriation their rate of addiction was no greater than that of draftees who were to go to Vietnam, but never did go because the war had ended.”

“Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.”

“Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.”

“Since this is the age of science, not religion, psychiatrists are our rabbis, heroin is our pork, and the addict is the unclean person.”