Although the Chinese had used opium as a medicine, there was no widespread addiction before the British arrived.
Robert Trout

Among the remedies which it has pleased Almighty God to give to man to relieve his sufferings, none is so universal and so efficacious as opium.
Thomas Sydenham

Confucianism strongly condemned the use of drugs like opium.
Robert Trout

Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.
Jean Cocteau

If organized religion is the opium of the masses, then disorganized religion is the marijuana of the lunatic fringe.
Kerry Thornley

If you make a treaty first with the United States and settle the matter of the opium trade, England cannot change this, though she should desire to do so.
Townsend Harris

It appears that the English think the Japanese... are fond of opium, and they want to bring it here also.
Townsend Harris

It is not opium which makes me work but its absence, and in order for me to feel its absence it must from time to time be present.
Antonin Artaud

Many Chinese saw opium as a poison introduced by foreign enemies.
Robert Trout

Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals.
Edmund Wilson

Nobody will laugh long who deals much with opium: its pleasures even are of a grave and solemn complexion.
Thomas de Quincey

Opium teaches only one thing, which is that aside from physical suffering, there is nothing real.
Andre Malraux

Optimism is the opium of the people.
Milan Kundera

Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide.
Tom Robbins

Religion is the opium of the masses.
Karl Marx

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
Karl Marx

Religious suffering is at once the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of the heartless world, as it is the soul of soulless condition. It is the opium of the people.
John Desmond Bernal

The book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those literary counterparts to the opium den.
Phillip Adams

The British seizure of Hongkong was an aspect of one of the most ugly crimes of the British Empire: the takeover and destruction of India, and the use of India to flood China with opium.
Robert Trout

The East India Company established a monopoly over the production of opium, shortly after taking over Bengal.
Robert Trout