Iain Gately > Quotes

“Juan de Grijalva, coincidentally the first European to smoke on continental American soil,”
― Iain Gately, Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization

“The merchant ships that carried tea from India to Great Britain were loaded with beer for the voyage out. Expatriate Britons in the subcontinent had prodigious thirsts for their native brews and paid the highest prices for any that reached them without spoiling. The passage to India crossed the equator twice”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“While Aristotle had worked it out in principle and succeeded in turning wine into water”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“A universal weakness of humanity is to equate the strength of an argument with their opinion of its maker.”
― Iain Gately, Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization

“Two of its members, Rodrigo de Jerez and the interpreter Luis de Torres, had even gone so far as to try the custom for themselves, thus becoming the first Europeans to smoke tobacco.”
― Iain Gately, Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization

“The name Manhattan is reputed to be of bibulous origin: According to a Moravian missionary”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“These spectacles were staged to purchase the affection of the masses. The republic was dead”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“As a Texan periodical observed of its readership”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“It is ironic that a number of eminent Christians were charged with the care of the same plant whose consumption had been linked with the arch-fiend and enemy of their church.”
― Iain Gately, Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization

“The retail price of tobacco, whatever its source, was very high – only the rich could afford such an infallible medicine.”
― Iain Gately, Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization

“Moreover”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“Eagerness in drinking is a practice injurious to the partaker. Do not haste to mischief, my friend. Your drink is not being taken from you. It is given you, and waits you.”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“Their compliments were almost universal, their warnings few, if dire. Wine was a force for good, a substance that enabled people to relax while simultaneously elevating their minds, inspiring drinkers to “laughter and wisdom and prudence and learning.”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“in 1831 a “self-made cheese-monger” named Joseph Livesey launched a campaign against drinking that attacked the habit from a new and radical angle. Livesey hailed from Preston in northeast England—the heartland of the textiles industry. It was an environment where the benefits of sobriety were immediately evident to both employers and employees: Factory work required precision”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“Such extravagance was not merely hedonism but a duty. It was part and parcel of being upper class. The responsibility is apparent in an English allegorical poem of the period entitled “Winner and Waster,” which represents acts of conspicuous distribution and consumption as being the perfect expressions of the aristocratic ethos.”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“Drunkenness was ubiquitous in the young republic. Its towns were packed with taverns”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“By the 1820s”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“The first part of the continent in which distillation flourished was Germany”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“If an Aztec and a Roman were transported to the twenty-first century the Aztec might be the less mystified. He would know why people were smoking.”
― Iain Gately, Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization

“In addition to the aforementioned exceptions”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“The intransigence of immigrant voters was not the only obstacle temperance reformers faced at the polls. American elections were notoriously wet events. Just as Athenian citizens in the days of Plato had received free wine on important civic occasions”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

“The problem of Indian drinking worsened as spirits became ubiquitous in colonial America. Since the native tribes had no place for alcoholic drinks in their cultures or diets”
― Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol