Terence Winter Quotes

Prohibition begets proliferation

Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.

There'd never been a more advantageous time to be a criminal in America than during the 13 years of Prohibition. At a stroke, the American government closed down the fifth largest industry in the United States - alcohol production - and just handed it to criminals - a pretty remarkable thing to do.

Prohibition is a Constitutional mandate and I hold it absolutely necessary to give it a fair and thorough trial.

Prohibition is an awful flop. We like it. It can't stop what it's meant to stop. We like it. It's left a trail of graft and slime, It don't prohibit worth a dime, It's filled our land with vice and crime. Nevertheless, we're for it.

Liquor - you can make it illegal but you can't make it unpopular.

People have forgotten the effects of prohibition. We have become the United Statesof Amnesia.

Prohibition cannot be enforced for the simple reason that the majority of American people do not want it enforced and are resisting its enforcement.

Prohibition has made nothing but trouble.

In the domain of cops and robbers, an interdiction serves to structure a black market and a shadow economy.

Someone once accused me of being like Eliot Ness. I sad no sir, I'm not E.N., but I can promise you that I'm not Al Capone!

The Prohibition era is so vividly depicted in 'Lawless.' John Hillcoat does a remarkable job of rooting his film in such a tangible reality.

The country is being flooded with illegal liquor and that either Congress will need to modify the law or spend incalculable sums to enforce it [Prohibition].

We advocate the repeal of the 18th Amendment.

[Describing Prohibition:] Politicians are ducking, candidates are hedging, the Anti-Saloon League is prospering, people are being poisoned, bootleggers are being enriched, and Government officials are being corrupted.

The saloon is as dead as slavery.

The period of Prohibition … brought on the greatest breakdown of law and order the United States has known until today. I think there is a lesson here. Do not regulate the private morals of people. Do not tell them what they can take or not take. Because if you do, they will become angry and antisocial and they will get what they want from criminals who are able to work in perfect freedom because they have paid off the police.

Illegal stills had always been plentiful in the South, so Prohibition there did not have the bite that it had in the North.

A bootlegger is a bootlegger, a scalper is a scalper.

Bootleggers were romanticized by people like F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example. Gatsby is a bootlegger. And they were not thought of as evil criminals in the newspapers, either. There was a certain amount of affection for them.

Bootleggers quake in fear of me ringing them on a Sunday afternoon. I call after dinner, usually.

Prohibition? I drink to its health whenever I can.

Some call it bootlegging. Some call it racketeering. I call it a business.

I used often to go to America during Prohibition, and there was far more drunkenness there then than before; the prohibition of pornography has much the same effect.

In fact, the whole thing about prohibition is this: it isn't the initial cost, it's the humidity.