Quotes about saloon (27 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Gordon put his hand against the swing door. He even pushed it open a few inches. The warm fog of smoke and beer slipped through the crack. A familiar, reviving smell; nevertheless as he smelled it his nerve failed him. No! Impossible to go in. He turned away. He couldn't go shoving into that saloon bar with only fourpence halfpenny in his pocket. Never let other people buy your drinks for you! The first commandment of the moneyless. He made off down the dark pavement.”

George Orwell book Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Source: Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Ch. 4

People , Drink , Beer

“The saloon is a liar. It promises good cheer and sends sorrow.”

Billy Sunday (1862–1935) American evangelist and baseball player

Source: Billy Sunday Quotes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAfeTcqGTJA / www.famousquotes.com

“A kind of music far superior, in my opinion, to that of operas, and which in all Italy has not its equal, nor perhaps in the whole world, is that of the 'scuole'. The 'scuole' are houses of charity, established for the education of young girls without fortune, to whom the republic afterwards gives a portion either in marriage or for the cloister. Amongst talents cultivated in these young girls, music is in the first rank. Every Sunday at the church of each of the four 'scuole', during vespers, motettos or anthems with full choruses, accompanied by a great orchestra, and composed and directed by the best masters in Italy, are sung in the galleries by girls only; not one of whom is more than twenty years of age. I have not an idea of anything so voluptuous and affecting as this music; the richness of the art, the exquisite taste of the vocal part, the excellence of the voices, the justness of the execution, everything in these delightful concerts concurs to produce an impression which certainly is not the mode, but from which I am of opinion no heart is secure. Carrio and I never failed being present at these vespers of the 'Mendicanti', and we were not alone. The church was always full of the lovers of the art, and even the actors of the opera came there to form their tastes after these excellent models. What vexed me was the iron grate, which suffered nothing to escape but sounds, and concealed from me the angels of which they were worthy. I talked of nothing else. One day I spoke of it at Le Blond's; "If you are so desirous," said he, "to see those little girls, it will be an easy matter to satisfy your wishes. I am one of the administrators of the house, I will give you a collation [light meal] with them." I did not let him rest until he had fulfilled his promise. In entering the saloon, which contained these beauties I so much sighed to see, I felt a trembling of love which I had never before experienced. M. le Blond presented to me one after the other, these celebrated female singers, of whom the names and voices were all with which I was acquainted. Come, Sophia, — she was horrid. Come, Cattina, — she had but one eye. Come, Bettina, — the small-pox had entirely disfigured her. Scarcely one of them was without some striking defect.
Le Blond laughed at my surprise; however, two or three of them appeared tolerable; these never sung but in the choruses; I was almost in despair. During the collation we endeavored to excite them, and they soon became enlivened; ugliness does not exclude the graces, and I found they possessed them. I said to myself, they cannot sing in this manner without intelligence and sensibility, they must have both; in fine, my manner of seeing them changed to such a degree that I left the house almost in love with each of these ugly faces. I had scarcely courage enough to return to vespers. But after having seen the girls, the danger was lessened. I still found their singing delightful; and their voices so much embellished their persons that, in spite of my eyes, I obstinately continued to think them beautiful.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Genevan philosopher

Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1765-1770; published 1782), On the musicians of the Ospedale della Pieta (book VII)

Love , Marriage , Age , World

“If I had to live my life over, I'd live over a saloon.”

W.C. Fields (1880–1946) actor

Life

“Grand pappy told my pappy back in my day son
A man had to answer for the wicked that he'd done
Take all the rope in Texas, find a tall oak tree
Round up all of them bad boys, hang them high in the street
For all the people to seeThat justice is the one thing you should always find
You got to saddle up your boys, you got to draw a hard line
When the gun smoke settles, we'll sing a victory tune
And we'll all meet back at the local saloon.
We'll raise up our glasses against Evil forces singing
Whiskey for my men, beer for my horses.”

Toby Keith (1961) American country music singer and actor

Beer for My Horses, written with Scotty Emerick.
Song lyrics, Unleashed (2002)

Men , People , Justice , Boy

“I know an awful lot of Hollywood people, who are so self-important, I can't understand it. My father was a good Irish saloon-keeper, my mother always said to him, 'Jack, how come you know everybody here' and he'd say, 'because I say hello.”

Mickey Spillane (1918–2006) American writer

I'm just like that, I've always been that way.
Crime Time interview (2001)

People , Way , Understanding

“A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;
The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a rag-time tune;
Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,
And watching his luck was his light-o'-love, the lady that’s known as Lou.”

Robert W. Service (1874–1958) Canadian poet

The Shooting of Dan McGrew http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/biography/service_r_w/dan_mcgrew.html (1907)

Love , Music , Game , Boy

“The press – the popular press – is drinking in the Last Chance Saloon.”

David Mellor (1949) former British politician, non-practising barrister, broadcaster, journalist and businessman

Quoted in Roy Greenslade, "A decade of diplomacy," http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2001/feb/05/mondaymediasection.pressandpublishing The Guardian (2001-02-05)
Comment made in 1989 after a series of salacious stories in the tabloid press.

Drink , Chance

“The sale of assets is common with individuals and states when they run into financial difficulties. First, all the Georgian silver goes, and then all that nice furniture that used to be in the saloon. Then the Canalettos go.”

Harold Macmillan (1894–1986) British politician

"Stockton attacks Thatcher policies", The Times, 9 November 1985, p. 1.
Speech to the Tory Reform Group, 8 November 1985. Often quoted as "selling off the family silver".
1980s

“Down on Spring Street, in a bar across the street from the secondhand store. With my last nickel I went there for a cup of coffee. an old style place, sawdust on the floor, crudely drawn nudes smeared across the walls. It was a saloon where old men gathered, where the beer was cheap and smelled sour, where the past remained unaltered.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Men , Spring , Coffee , Beer

“As the screams in the water multiplied, another sound was heard, strong and clear at first, then fainter in the distance. It was the melody of the hymn “Nearer, My God, To Thee,” played by the string orchestra in the dining saloon.”

Steve Turner (1949) British writer

Source: The Band That Played On (Thomas Nelson, 2011), p. 10

God , Strong , Water

“I wonder who will find the film more uncomfortable - men or women? Both will recoil from the brutality of the scenes of the assault. But for some men, the movie will reveal a truth that most women already know. It is that verbal sexual harassment, whether crudely in a saloon back room or subtly in an everyday situation, is a form of violence - one that leaves no visible marks but can make its victims feel unable to move freely and casually in society.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-accused-1988 of The Accused (14 October 1988)
Reviews, Three star reviews

Women , Men , Truth , Feeling

“To stroll on wharves, and in alleys and in streets and in the houses, waiting-rooms, even saloons, that is not a pleasant pastime unless for an artist. As such, one would rather be in the dirtiest place where there is something to draw, than at a tea party with charming ladies. Unless one wants to draw ladies, then a tea party is all right even for an artist.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

quote in his letter to brother Theo, from The Hague, The Netherlands in Spring 1882; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, p. 34 (letter 190)
1880s, 1882

Waiting , Tea , Drawing , Housing

“Tonight there was music in the saloon, a piano and a violin; two fat women with hard masculine faces and short haircuts. Their song was Over the Waves. Ta de da da, and I watched Camilla dancing with her beer tray. Her hair was so black, so deep and clustered, like grapes hiding her neck. This was a sacred place, this saloon. Everything here was holy, the chairs, the tables, that rag in her hand, that sawdust under her feet. She was a Mayan princess and this was her castle. I watched the tattered huaraches glide across the floor, and I wanted those huaraches. I would like them to hold in my hands against my chest when I fell asleep. I would like to hold them and breathe the odor of them.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Women , Music , Beer , Dance

“That's always the hardest question. Lately I've been listening to Derek and the Dominos, the Bar-Kays. I really like the first Patti Smith. I'm just starting to discover the Cure. I keep trying to find things to open myself up to. I enjoy Soundgarden. The singer [Chris Cornell] just buries me. The guy sings so great. On the club circuit, I like Saigon Saloon a lot.”

Axl Rose (1962) American singer-songwriter and musician

Guy , Question , Singing

“I knew what was comin’ when a young Irishman drops whisky and takes to beer and long pipes in a German saloon. That young man is today one of the wildest Anarchists in town. p. 12”

George Washington Plunkitt (1842–1924) New York State Senator

Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, Chapter 3, The Curse of Civil Service Reform

Beer

“One result of the nobility and gentry becoming more mobile and mixing more together was new kinds of parties. From the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century, whenever people decided to entertain, they did so in much the same way. They gave either a dinner on its own, or a dinner combined with dancing. The latter combination started with a meal, sometimes enlivened by music. After dinner the company retired to a withdrawing room, and passed an hour or so by taking tea or dessert, or playing cards, or listening to more music. They then returned to the room where they had dined, for dancing or as it tended to be called, a ball; in the early eighteenth century as few as seven couples dancing together could be described as a ball. After dancing there was normally some kind of light refreshment, and then everybody went home. The refreshments at the end might, according to the century, be described as a banquet or a supper, the room for dinner and dancing a great chamber or a saloon; the dances danced, the music played and the food eaten changed, but the pattern remained much the same. The guests did one thing at a time, and they all did it together.”

Mark Girouard (1931) British architectural historian

Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (1978)

People , Food , Music , Way

“So long as colonies and immigrant sections exist, with their inferior housing, sanitation, and care, Americanization will fail. It matters not at all that we satisfy our conscience by saying that immigrants prefer to live this way or that they lived this way in their own country. To say this is to forget that the crowded dwelling in Italy through which permeated the beauty and art, the religion, tradition, and association of the old country, is vastly different from the huts across the railroad track filled with strangers to whom the shop and saloon are the centers of gravity.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Religion , Beauty , Art , Way

“[M]any quite frankly fought to protect slavery, which laid on the survivors of the rebel armies an incubus to which few were willing to admit in alter years. More than just one out of three Confederates whose campfires dotted South Mountain in the June dusk owned slaves… [T]hey brought slaves with them on campaign to tend to the menial jobs… The slave system had invested them with an instinctive impulse for domestic dictatorship; they could brawl, stab, and shoot, in and out of race tracks and saloons, and still assume that they were God's natural aristocrats.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

Source: 2010s, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (2013), p. 15

God , Mountain , Nature

“Saloons provide moments of genuine ecstasy — but only if your soul is at peace and the rest of your life bears contemplating. Otherwise, they are palaces of misery.”

Wilfrid Sheed (1930–2011) English-American novelist and essayist

"Now That Men Can Cry...," p. 299
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

Life , Peace , Soul

“Ought these good people be subjected to the immoral influence of money taken from the saloon tainted money? Out of respect for the tender consciences of these pious people, the Raines law ought to exempt them from all contamination from the plunder that comes from the saloon traffic. Say, mark that sarcastic. Some people who ain’t used to fine sarcasm might think I meant it. p. 85”

George Washington Plunkitt (1842–1924) New York State Senator

Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, Chapter 21, Concerning Excise

Money , People , Law , Thinking

“To beg drinks in the saloon became an obsession. Many evenings my mother would find me wandering in a daze and take me home and beat me; but the next morning, no sooner had she gone to her job than I would run to the saloon and wait for someone to take me in and buy me a drink. My mother protested tearfully to the proprietor of the saloon, who ordered me to keep out of his place. But the men—reluctant to surrender their sport—would buy me drinks anyway, letting me drink out of their flasks on the streets, urging me to repeat obscenities. I was a drunkard in my sixth year, before I had begun school.”

Richard Wright book Black Boy

Black Boy (1945)

Men , School , Home , Drink

“Time was when men of Horse Watson’s profession typically never slept sober, and died with their livers eroded. It must have been fun to watch the literate swashbucklers make fools of themselves in the frontier saloons, indulging in horsewhippings and shoot-outs with rival journalists and their partisans. But who stopped to think what it was to have the power of words and publication, to discover that an entire town and territory would judge, condemn, act, reprieve and glorify because of something you had slugged together the night before? Because of something you had handset into type, smudging your fingertips with metal poisons that inexorably began their journey through your bloodstream? For the sake of the power, you turned your liver and kidneys into spongy, irascible masses; you tainted the tissue of your brain with heavy metal ions until it became a house haunted by stumbling visions. Alcohol would temporarily overcome the effect. So you became an alcoholic, and purchased sanity one day at a time, and made a spectacle of yourself. It was neither funny nor tragic in the end—it was simply a fact of life that operated more slowly on the mediocre, because the mediocre could turn themselves off and go to sleep whether they had done the night’s job to their own satisfaction or not.”

Algis Budrys book Michaelmas

Source: Michaelmas (1977), Chapter 3 (pp. 36-37)

Sleep , Time , Night , Housing

“Tonight there was music in the saloon, a piano and a violin; two fat women with hard masculine faces and short haircuts. Their song was Over the Waves.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ta de da da, and I watched Camilla dancing with her beer tray. Her hair was so black, so deep and clustered, like grapes hiding her neck. This was a sacred place, this saloon. Everything here was holy, the chairs, the tables, that rag in her hand, that sawdust under her feet. She was a Mayan princess and this was her castle. I watched the tattered huaraches glide across the floor, and I wanted those huaraches. I would like them to hold in my hands against my chest when I fell asleep. I would like to hold them and breathe the odor of them.
Ask the Dust (1939)

Music , Women

“To stroll on wharves, and in alleys and in streets and in the houses, waiting-rooms, even saloons, that is not a pleasant pastime unless for an artist.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

As such, one would rather be in the dirtiest place where there is something to draw, than at a tea party with charming ladies. Unless one wants to draw ladies, then a tea party is all right even for an artist.
quote in his letter to brother Theo, from The Hague, The Netherlands in Spring 1882; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, p. 34 (letter 190)
1880s, 1882

Housing , Waiting

“I played so many oriental princesses and cowtown saloon madams after that I lost count. I broke in all the new actors, to use a phrase. I acted with Rock Hudson and Tony Curtis before they became big names.”

Yvonne De Carlo (1922–2007) Canadian-American actress, dancer, and singer

Source: As quoted in "A girl no longer, but . . . De Carlo's a beauty still" (1975)

Princess

“It was a dangerous area, for certain. There were saloons, prostitutes, everything. The real Wild West. There was no law to speak of; everyone carried weapons, and they used them. Gambling was rampant, and crime increased with the growing population.”

James Doolittle (1896–1993) United States Air Force Medal of Honor recipient

On the memories of his childhood place of Nome, Alaska in an 1993 interview, "The Extraordinary Life Of Aviation Legend Jimmy Doolittle" https://allthatsinteresting.com/jimmy-doolittle

Law