Alcoholics Anonymous Quotes

“Fortunately, some people eat a lot or drink only on special occasions. Unfortunately, they see every—or almost every—day of their lives as a special occasion.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“You don’t have be lying in a hospital bed to be alcoholic. Many alcoholics function at a high level and appear fine. But, bit by bit, as the dependence gets more control, their life starts to unravel – their body, their relationships, their work, their ability to be productive, their mood, their self-respect, their will to live. They have to give it the flick. There isn’t any other way. Give it the flick or it’s gotcha.”
― Donna Goddard, Purnima

“I had trouble with the God thing. A lot of people do.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“The devil wants me dead but he will settle for drunk.”
― Patrick Harrington, Recreating Patrick: An Inside Job

“ANYONE WITH 16 YRS OF SOBRIETY SHOULD GET A FUCKING OSCAR”
― Dmitry Dyatlov

“If all of these nuts could just make phone calls it could spread insanity oozing through telephone cables...”
― Brad Pitt

“Sometimes, he would say (like all alcoholics) that if someone is a happy drunk then it is okay. There are no happy drunks. They all end up a misery. So do the people around them.”
― Donna Goddard, Purnima

“People drink because they want the happiness that comes with mental oblivion. There is another way – less damaging, more healthy, less up and down, more stable.”
― Donna Goddard, Purnima

“As Freud said, if you don’t pay you don’t get better.”
― Rick Roderick

“Not one of my favourites. Kind of pitty.”
― Petra Hermans, Voor een betere wereld

“All I have to do is survive until graduation. One day at a time, right? I know that’s a mantra from Alcoholics Anonymous, but as far as odious afflictions go, it’s my experience that high school should have a twelve-step recovery or its own. There’d probably be fewer alcoholics if it did.”
― Josephine Angelini, Scions

“These were the days of the big smokey rooms overflowing with recovering drunks of every race, creed, and color. I relished the opportunity to accompany Mom to her meetings. You could sit in the back of those rooms and hear the sort of Frankenstein tales even Mary Shelley couldn’t have written.”
― Rafael Moscatel, The Secret Adoption: A Family Memoir

“Drown in drinks, and life is lost. Drink up life, and drinks are lost.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Divine Refugee

“Don't be an alcoholic, be a writer - hundred times the intoxication, without the primitiveness.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Divine Refugee

“So grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty is a FULL TIME JOB (emphasis added)”
― Chuck C., A New Pair of Glasses

“You don’t come into AA because everything’s working out fantastic.”
― Dax Shepard

“Your hair has gotta be on fire before you go like, 'Yeah, I’ll go hang with a bunch of dudes and talk about emotions'.”
― Dax Shepard

“I don’t even know what my higher power is.”
“That didn’t stop you from getting on your knees with me a year ago and asking it to remove your suffering.”
“Asking what?” Cyrus asked. “What were we even talking to?”
“Who cares?” Gabe answered. “To not-your-own-massive-fucking-ego. That’s the only part that matters.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“AA was created in 1935; GA was started in 1957. I think I'm safe in asserting that we know orders of magnitude more about addiction now than we did back in the thirties and fifties. The AA methods, the dogmatic culture, and the written materials (especially true of GA) are stuck in a time before most of today's addicts were even born.”
― Kurt Dahl, Gambling Addiction: The complete guide to survival, treatment, and recovery from gambling addiction.

“Alcoholics Anonymous was proclaimed the correct treatment for alcoholism over seventy-five years ago despite the absence of any scientific evidence of the approach’s efficacy, and we have been on the wrong path ever since. Today, almost every treatment center, physician, and court system in the country uses this model. Yet it has one of the worst success rates in all of medicine: between 5 and 10 percent, hardly better than no treatment at all. Most of the expensive, famous rehab centers that base their treatment on the Twelve Steps likewise have offered no evidence for their effectiveness. Most of them don’t even study their own outcomes.”
― Lance Dodes, The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry

“In the seventy-six years since AA was created, 12-step programs have expanded to include over three hundred different organizations, focusing on such diverse issues as smoking, shoplifting, social phobia, debt, recovery from incest, even vulgarity. All told, more than five million people recite the Serenity Prayer at meetings across the United States every year.”
― Lance Dodes, The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry

“Going to rehab” is likewise a common refrain in music and film, where it is almost always uncritically presented as the one true hope for beating addiction.”
― Lance Dodes, The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry

“Every year, our state and federal governments spend over $15 billion on substance-abuse treatment for addicts, the vast majority of which are based on 12-step programs. There is only one problem: these programs almost always fail.”
― Lance Dodes, The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry

“Peer-reviewed studies peg the success rate of AA somewhere between 5 and 10 percent. That is, about one of every fifteen people who enter these programs is able to become and stay sober.”
― Lance Dodes, The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry

“In 2006, one of the most prestigious scientific research organizations in the world, the Cochrane Collaboration, conducted a review of the many studies conducted between 1966 and 2005 and reached a stunning conclusion: “No experimental studies unequivocally demonstrated the effectiveness of AA” in treating alcoholism.”
― Lance Dodes, The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry

“AA began as a nonprofessional attempt to grapple with the alcoholism of its founders. It arose and took its famous twelve steps directly from the Oxford Group, a fundamentalist religious organization founded in the early twentieth century.”
― Lance Dodes, The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry

“AA spread like wildfire through a country desperate for hope at the end of Prohibition and in the midst of the Great Depression.”
― Lance Dodes, The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry

“AA has managed to survive, in part, because members who become and remain sober speak and write about it regularly. This is no accident: AA’s twelfth step expressly tells members to proselytize for the organization: “Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.” Adherence to this step has created a classic sampling error: because most of us hear only from the people who succeeded in the program, it is natural to conclude that they represent the whole. In reality, these members speak for an exceptionally small percentage of addicts.”
― Lance Dodes, The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry

“AA makes inflated claims about itself. Its foundational document, Alcoholics Anonymous (commonly referred to as the “Big Book” and a perennial best seller), spells out a confident ethos regularly endorsed by AA members: "Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault; they seem to have been born that way. They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty. Their chances are less than average. There are those, too, who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders, but many of them do recover if they have the capacity to be honest." In other words, the program doesn’t fail; you fail. Imagine if similar claims were made in defense of an ineffective antibiotic. Imagine dismissing millions of people who did not respond to a new form of chemotherapy as “constitutionally incapable” of properly receiving the drug. Of course, no researchers would make such claims in scientific circles—if they did, they would risk losing their standing. In professional medicine, if a treatment doesn’t work, it’s the treatment that must be scrutinized, not the patient. Not so for Alcoholics Anonymous.”
― Lance Dodes, The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry

“More than anything, AA offers a comforting veneer of actionable change: it is something you can do.”
― Lance Dodes, The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry