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

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

“A rabbi's dog could score pork chops in the streets of Tel Aviv easier than Bernard could acquire tequila in King County Jail.”

“Kids are like heroin, a little heroin addiction. When it’s bad, you’ve never been so miserable, but when it’s good you’ve never been so high.”

“Among our egocentric sad-sacks, despair is as addictive as heroin and more popular than sex, for the single reason that when one is unhappy one gets to pay a lot of attention to oneself. Misery becomes a kind of emotional masturbation.”

“When we vest our personal opinions with the trappings of religion, we make religion the servant of our politics.”

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

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

“A great swindle of our time is the assumption that science has made religion obsolete.”

“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.”