When I was a boy, I naively thought that this thing called happiness would be something I would wake up to find every day once I could smoke, drink and fornicate.

To be a Russian writer at the end of the nineteenth century must have meant bearing an inescapably bitter fate. The more they tried to escape from Russia, the more deeply Russia swallowed them.

It is sad that people need alcohol to make them happy.

This self-confident generation has produced more alcoholics, more drug addicts, more criminals, more wars, more broken homes, more assaults, more embezzlements, more murders, and more suicides . . .it is time all of us . . . begin to take stock of our failures, blunders, and costly mistakes. It is about time that we place less confidence in ourselves and more trust and faith in God.

Among young people . . . drinking is for getting drunk. And many go on to become alcoholics.

The Bible condemns the use of any substance which alters or distorts our thinking (including alcohol, which was the most common drug in ancient times).