Top 49 Saloon Quotes & Sayings

If I had to choose between putting a saloon or a liberal church on a corner, I'd choose the saloon every time. People who drink up the pay check in the saloon are less likely to become Pharisees, thinking that they don't need the Great Physician, than those who weekly swill the soporific doctrine of man's goodness.

I come from a long line of saloon keepers and proselytizers, and I draw from both sides.

A horrid alcoholic explosion scatters all my good intentions like bits of limbs and clothes over the doorsteps and into the saloon bars of the tawdriest pubs.

I want a woman who can go to the saloon with me, not hypocritical, fame seeking

Tolerance to my mind has been greatly overrated . . . . I take as much pleasure in detesting the good brothers and sisters of the [Anti-Saloon] League as they have in hating me.

You sit back in the darkness, nursing your beer, breathing in that ineffable aroma of the old-time saloon: dark wood, spilled beer, good cigars, and ancient whiskey - the sacred incense of the drinking man.

Declining to go to church with my parents in the morning, I would ostentatiously set out for the Monist Society in the afternoon, down an obscure street which it seemed a little improper to be walking on, as everything was closed for Sunday, upstairs through a sort of side entrance over a saloon.

The average player would rather play than watch. Those who don't play can't possibly appreciate the subtleties of the game. Trying to get their attention with golf is like selling Shakespeare in the neighbourhood saloon.

I have now run up against an ugly snag, the Sunday Excise Law. It is altogether too strict, but I have no honorable alternative save to enforce it and I am enforcing it, to the furious rage of the saloon keepers, and of many good people too; for which I am sorry.

I decided that there was only one place to make money in the mutual fund business, as there is only one place for a temperate man to be in a saloon: behind the bar and not in front of it.

When Prohibition was introduced, I hoped that it would be widely supported by public opinion and the day would soon come when the evil effects of alcohol would be recognised. I have slowly and reluctantly come to believe that this has not been the result. Instead, drinking has generally increased; the speakeasy has replaced the saloon; a vast army of lawbreakers has appeared; many of our best citizens have openly ignored Prohibition; respect for the law has been greatly lessened; and crime has increased to a level never seen before.

The saloon is a liar. It promises good cheer and sends sorrow.

I ask especially that no state shall, by law or otherwise, authorize the return of the saloon, either in its old form or in some modern guise.

It was shocking to see a leg! You've never seen a leg in these stories. We made it a little saloon girl. We played up on many elements because everything is just very covered and the tights are very thick and heavy. And then to have it all fell apart, absolutely, we wanted to see the leg!

Salvador [Dali] was brought up in Spain, a country colored by the legends of Hannibal, El Greco, and Cervantes. I was brought up in Ohio, a region steeped in the tradition of Coxey's Army, the Anti-Saloon League, and William Howard Taft.

The semi-colon is a burp, a hiccup. It's a drunk staggering out of the saloon at 2 a.m., grabbing your lapels on the way and asking you to listen to one more story.

The tide of visitors will float slowly about the bottom of the valley as harmless scum collecting in hotel and saloon eddies, leaving the rocks and falls eloquent as ever.

Freedom in every sense but primarily political sense, a rise in repression that stems from a repression of sexuality. It's AIDS, it's herpes, it's this, it's that. Ask any saloon owner what's happened to social life in America in the past 12 years and they'll tell you it's a different world and these people are strongly misinformed by the media, peer pressure.

There are a million boys growing up in the United States who have never seen a saloon, and who will never know the handicap of liquor and this excellent condition will go on spreading over the country when the wet press and the paid propogandists of booze are forgotten. The abolition of the commercialized liquor trade in this country is as final as the abolition of slavery.

And now, in honour of the 150th anniversary of Beethoven's death, I would like to play 'Clear the Saloon', er, 'Clair de Lune', by Debussy. I don't play Beethoven so well, but I play Debussy very badly, and Beethoven would have liked that.

men will have to resign themselves to the fact that the old-time saloon, for men only, will never again exist. Once a woman has felt a brass rail under her instep, there can be no more needlepoint footstools for her.

In one dancing saloon I saw the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across. Over the piano was printed a notice: 'Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.'

If I had to live my life over, I'd live over a saloon.

There is no law, divine or human, that the saloon respects.

Fortune knocks at every man's door once in a life, but in a good many cases the man is in a neighboring saloon and does not hear her.

When I'm writing in long hand, it just goes on and on and on. When I was in the saloon business, I would just greet people and talk to them and avoid taxes, and getting behind the bar. What else.

The saloon is a liar. It promises good cheer and sends sorrow. It promises prosperity and sends adversity. It promises happiness and sends misery.... It is God's worst enemy and the devil's best friend.

If I were hungry and friendless today, I would rather take my chances with a saloon-keeper than with the average preacher.

I challenge you to show me where the saloon has ever helped business, education, church, morals or anything we hold dear.

I wanted to get the guy who works next to me in the office something he really wants, but how do you wrap up a saloon?

If I had my life to live over again, I'd live over a saloon.

At heart, I guess I'm a saloon singer because there's a greater intimacy between performer and audience in a nightclub. Then again, I love the excitement of appearing before a big concert audience. Let's just say that the place isn't important, as long as everybody has a good time.

I tell you that the curse of God Almighty is on the saloon.

My father ran a saloon in Kenosha, Wis., which is just about as rough a living as I can think of. It was brutal; it scared the hell out of me. I was so petrified all the while I was a child, I didn't know what I was doing half the time.

My books kept me from the ring, the dog-pit, the tavern, and the saloon.

I got into a brawl one night in a saloon in Greenwich Village. Elia Kazan, a great director, saw me put out a couple of hecklers and figures there was some Big Daddy in me, just lyin' dormant. And out it came. People still do call me Big Daddy, but to me, inside, I'm no Big Daddy at all.

The true speech of man is idiomatic, if not of the earth and sky, then at least of the saloon and the bleachers.

Call listened with amusement--not that the incident hadn't been terrible. Being decapitated was a grisly fate, whether you were a Yankee or not. But then, amusing things happened in battle, as they did in the rest of life. Some of the funniest things he had ever witnessed had occurred during battles. He had always found it more satisfying to laugh on a battlefield than anywhere else, for if you lived to laugh on a battlefield, you could feel you had earned the laugh. But if you just laughed in a saloon, or at a social, the laugh didn't reach deep.

If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest Hemingway walking into a saloon, finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead.

We're facing last orders in the last chance saloon when it comes to climate change.

There is an event once a year that I'm able to sing at, through 'Passions,' in Tennessee. That's always fun. We perform at the Wild Horse Saloon.

Right now in Oregon anybody can open a saloon, and hire people to come in and have sex in front of their patrons.

I mean, in my - and I'm not trying to do spilled milk, but in those days it was a little - I think it was much tougher, because you got an image, and you were in a saloon. And it was tough to come out of a saloon and to get in films, and to maintain an image, you know.

I busted out of the place in a hurry and went to a saloon and drank beer and said that for the rest of my life I'd never take a job in a place where you couldn't throw cigarette butts on the floor. I was hooked on this writing for newspapers and magazines.

What about the poor salesman who is calling into the office from the corner saloon instead of the home sickbed he claims he is in?

It is the music which makes it what it is; it is the music which changes the place from the rear room of a saloon in back of the yards to a fairy place, a wonderland, a little comer of the high mansions of the sky.

The hot hall full of painted girls and American soldiers is a saloon in some Western film. This noise drenches us, wakens us to do something else. It shows us a lost path.

The man who votes for the saloon is pulling on the same rope with the devil, whether he knows it or not.

I never considered acting while growing up. I just knew I didn't want to go into the saloon business: I wanted to get away from Kenosha. And once I left, never, ever did it cross my mind to go back. I went to college and thought I'd study law.