There’s nothing quite as enjoyable as musing on famous gin quotes. After all, what would our gin culture be without the many sippers who’ve waxed rhapsodic about the spirit?
Here in the UK, you can hardly consider yourself a gin drinker of repute without crafting a few relevant aphorisms to encourage your peers’ enjoyment (for proof, just see the quote that our Head Distiller Jared Brown invented, below – even if he is a Yank by birth).
From Winston Churchill to Ian Fleming (aka the father of James Bond), Britain’s most notable politicians, leaders, writers, and intellectuals have all contributed their fair share of famous gin quotes. To ground your sipping firmly in this most hallowed of traditions, we’re sharing more of our favourites. Perhaps these gin quotes will even inspire you to craft one or two witticisms of your own.
“Sitting with my gin or whisky afterwards I would often manage to get into conversation with some lonely man or other – usually an exile like myself – and the talk would be about the world, air-routes and shipping-lines, drinking-places thousands of miles away. Then I felt happy, felt I had come home, because home to people like me is not a place but all places, all places except the one we happen to be in at the moment.” – Anthony Burgess, The Right to an Answer, 1960
“I met a gin soaked, bar-room queen in Memphis / She tried to take me upstairs for a ride / She had to heave me right across her shoulder / Cause I just can’t seem to drink you off my mind” – The Rolling Stones, “Honky Tonk Woman”
“A dry martini is a mixed blessing.” – Jared Brown
“Gin-drinking is a great vice in England, but wretchedness and dirt are a greater; and until you improve the homes of the poor, or persuade a half-famished wretch not to seek relief in the temporary oblivion of his own misery, with the pittance, which divided among his family would furnish a morsel of bread for each, gin-shops will increase in number and splendour.” – Charles Dickens, Sketches By Boz, 1836
“For gin, in cruel Sober truth, supplies the fuel for flaming youth.” – Noel Coward, “Words and Music”
“… I decided I was a lemon for a couple of weeks. I kept myself amused all that time jumping in and out of a gin and tonic … I found a small lake that thought is was a gin and tonic, and jumped in and out of that. At least, I think it thought it was a gin and tonic.” – Ford Prefect in Life, The Universe and Everything, by Douglas Adams, 1982
“I am prepared to believe that a dry martini slightly impairs the palate, but think what it does for the soul.” – Alec Waugh
“He was white and shaken, like a dry martini.” – P. G. Wodehouse
And two anonymous quotes, to round up these favourites. Who else feels like a cocktail?
“According to chemists, gin IS a solution.” – Anon
“When life hands you lemons, make a gin and tonic.” – Anon
