Actors, scientists, doctors, bureaucrats, judges, police, civil rights leaders, attorneys, musicans, and presidents all seem to have something to say about marijuana. We collect those quotations for your enjoyment here at Oregon NORML's Cannabis Quotes. If you know of a good pro- or anti-cannabis quote, submit your quotation (with references) to webmaster
ornorml.org.
| "Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded." |
Abraham Lincoln -
Former President |
| "I smoked pot in college and in the Army..." |
Al Gore -
Former Vice President |
| "The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this." |
Albert Einstein -
Physicist, Nobel Prize Winner |
| "In the course of history many more people have died for their drink and their dope than have died for their religion or their country." |
Aldous Huxley -
Author |
| "Complete prohibition of all chemical mind changers can be decreed, but cannot be enforced, and tends to create more evils than it cures." |
Aldous Huxley -
Author |
| "We cannot, by total reliance on law, escape the duty to judge right and wrong... There are good laws and there are occasionally bad laws, and it conforms to the highest traditions of a free society to offer resistance to bad laws, and to disobey them." |
Alexander Bickel -
Constitutional scholar |
| "I, as a responsible adult human being, will never concede the power to
anyone to regulate my choice of what I put into my body, or where I go with my mind. From the skin inwards is my jurisdiction, is it not? I choose what may or may not cross that border. ...I am the sole legal and spiritual government of this territory, and only the laws I choose to enact within myself are applicable." |
Alexander Shulgin, PhD -
Chemist and Author |
| "Marijuana is a useful catalyst for specific optical and aural aesthetic perceptions. I apprehended the structure of certain pieces of jazz and classical music in a new manner under the influence of marijuana, and these apprehensions have remained valid in years of normal consciousness." |
Allen Ginsburg -
Activist |
| REEFER MADNESS: "If there were compelling scientific and medical data supporting marijuana's medical benefits that would be one thing, but the data is not there. The claim of one individual who has used marijuana does not medical data make. Marijuana has not gone through the test of science because it is a botanical and it doesn't have the same effect on every individual." |
Andrea Barthwell -
Former Deputy Drug Czar (Bush II) |
| REEFER MADNESS: "The people who are advancing marijuana as a medicine are perpetuating a cruel hoax that exploits our compassion for the sick. They are using patients' pain and suffering in an attempt to change America's drug control policy. Marijuana is a crude plant product that most definitely is not a medicine." |
Andrea Barthwell -
Former Deputy Drug Czar (Bush II) |
| REEFER MADNESS: "I doubt it was in the scheme that the Great Creator would put one plant on Earth that could cure everything wrong with you." |
Andrea Barthwell -
Former Deputy Drug Czar (Bush II) |
| REEFER MADNESS: "A crude plant is definitely not a medicine. A surgeon doesn't come to a patient recovering from surgery and give them a pipe of opium - you give them a derivative." |
Andrea Barthwell -
Former Deputy Drug Czar (Bush II) |
| REEFER MADNESS: "While there are no proven benefits to marijuana use, there are many short- and long-term risks associated with marijuana use. Even if smoking marijuana makes people feel better, that's not enough to call it a medicine." |
Andrea Barthwell -
Former Deputy Drug Czar (Bush II) |
| "I think pot should be legal. I don't smoke it, but I like the smell of it." |
Andy Warhol -
Artist |
| "Several generations of high school students have grown up ignoring and disbelieving everything they've heard from government and police about drugs, including information that was factual and valid, because they discovered for themselves that most of what has been taught to them was simply not true." |
Ann Shulgin, PhD -
Therapist and Author |
| "When they took the 4th Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs.
When they took the 5th Amendment, I was quiet because I wasn't a criminal.
When they took the 2nd Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't own a gun.
Now they've taken the 1st Amendment, and I can say nothing about it." |
Anonymous -
based on the Neimöller poem |
| "Abusus non tollit usum." [Translated: Abuse is no argument against proper use.] |
Anonymous -
Ancient Greek Proverb |
| "Avoir de la corde-de-pendu dans sa poche" [Translated: "To have some hemp in your pocket"] - a popular French idiom meaning "to have luck on your side in the most adverse circumstances." |
Anonymous -
French phrase |
| "Man made booze. God made marijuana. Who do you trust?" |
Anonymous -
Bumper Sticker |
| "You know I love pot, and I love beer, but I am totally sober, just because it completely stopped working for me." |
Anthony Keidis -
Singer, Red Hot Chili Peppers |
| "Yes, [I use] grass and hash - no hard drugs. But the point is I do what I feel like doing." |
Arnold Schwarzenegger (1977) -
Governor of California |
| "There seems to be no stopping drug frenzy once it takes hold of a nation. What starts with an innocuous HUGS, NOT DRUGS bumper sticker soon leads to wild talk of shooting dealers and making urine tests a condition for employment - anywhere." |
Barbara Ehrenreich -
Writer |
| "Let us not say that we will decide on a political basis at the national level that no State is competent to regulate the practice of medicine in that State if they decide to allow a doctor to prescribe marijuana, because that is what we are talking about." |
Barney Frank -
Congressman |
| "All laws which can be violated without doing anyone any injury are laughed at. Nay, so far are they from doing anything to control the desires and passions of man that, on the contrary, they direct and incite men's thoughts toward these very objects; for we always strive toward what is forbidden and desire the things we are not allowed to have." |
Baruch Spinoza -
Philosopher |
| "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" |
Benjamin Franklin -
Inventor |
| "When I was in England, I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn't like it, and I didn't inhale, and I never tried again." |
Bill Clinton -
Former President |
| "And on the seventh day, God stepped back and said 'There is my creation, perfect in every way... oh, dammit I left pot all over the place. Now they'll think I want them to smoke it... Now I have to create Republicans.'" |
Bill Hicks -
Comedian |
| "Why is marijuana against the law? It grows naturally upon our planet. Doesn't the idea of making nature against the law seem to you a bit... unnatural?" |
Bill Hicks -
Comedian |
| "They lie about marijuana. Tell you pot-smoking makes you unmotivated. Lie! When you're high, you can do everything you normally do, just as well. You just realize that it's not worth the f****** effort. There is a difference." |
Bill Hicks -
Comedian |
| "Smoking's a way to let you down slowly from a ballgame. It also makes you use less of the resources around. It makes people better in the way they act towards society. Everybody's nicer. It's hard to be mean when you're stoned." |
Bill Lee -
Baseball Player |
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