Quotes About Excess

Why should the wealth of the country be stored in banks and elevators while the idle workman wanders homeless about the streets and the idle loafers who hoard the gold only to spend it in riotous living are rolling about in fine carriages from which they look out on peaceful meetings and call them riots?

Amontillado. Broiled Shad à la Maréchel. Cucumbers. Potatoes à la Duchesse. Filet Mignon à la Rossini. Chateau Lafite and Rinnart Brut. Fonds d'Artichaut Farcis. Pommery Sec. Sorbet au Kirsch. Cigarettes. Woodcock on Toast. Asparagus Sala. Ices: Canton Ginger. Cheeses: Pont l'Eveque; Rocquefort. Coffee. Liquers. Madeira, 1815. Cigars. Gage

he was known for throwing elaborate parties, known as "freak dinners"—perhaps most notably the "Gondola Party" he hosted in 1905 at the Savoy Hotel in London, where he filled the hotel's courtyard with water, dressed everyone in Venetian garb, and served dinner to guests aboard a giant gondola. Lest this be deemed insufficient, he arranged to have a birthday cake—five feet tall—brought in on the back of a baby elephant.

His demand for fine things, especially those rendered in gold, was fed as well by a kind of institutional larceny.

The fair alone consumed three times as much electricity as the entire city of Chicago.

36 bottles of Amontillado—Duff Gordon's V.O.; 36 bottles, white wine—Valmur, 1934 [Chablis]; 36 bottles, port—Fonseca, 1912; 36 bottles, claret—Château Léoville Poyferré, 1929; 24 bottles, whisky—Fine Highland Malt; 12 bottles, brandy—Grande Fine Champagne, 1874 [66 years old, same as Churchill]; 36 bottles of champagne—Pommery et Greno, 1926 [Pol Roger, however, remained his favorite].

Because if you're drunk on sex and love, then I'm fucking wasted.

Got tight on absinthe last night. Did knife tricks.

There is no night life in Spain. They stay up late but they get up late. That is not night life. That is delaying the day. Night life is when you get up with a hangover in the morning. Night life is when everybody says what the hell and you do not remember who paid the bill. Night life goes round and round and you look at the wall to make it stop. Night life comes out of a bottle and goes into a jar. If you think how much are the drinks it is not night life.

There had been too much emotion, too much damage, too much of everything.

There is milk? What luxury!

All right, said Nick. Let's get drunk. All right, Bill said. Let's get really drunk.

Drink it down, baby, and look forward to being sick.

No pleasure in anything if you mouth it up too much.

To drink is nothing. It's important to be drunk.

For toxicologists, "the dose makes the poison." Any substance can be toxic in excess. Water, for instance, is lethal to humans in very high doses, and overhydration killed a runner in the 2002 Boston Marathon. But most people prefer to think of substances as either safe or dangerous, regardless of the dose. And we extend this thinking to exposure, in that we regard any exposure to chemicals, no matter how brief or limited, as harmful.

What color is your Bugatti?

What color is ur Bugatti

On the soft bed of luxury many kingdoms have expired.

Human greed knows no limits.

Human greed knows no limits. – Nivellen

Computers may save time but they sure waste a lot of paper. About 98 percent of everything printed out by a computer is garbage that no one ever reads.

Making duplicate copies and computer printouts of things no one wanted even one of in the first place is giving America a new sense of purpose.

Whenever we have more than we need, our natural assumption will be that it's for our own consumption.