“Total abstinence is so excellent a thing that it cannot be carried to too great an extent. In my passion for it I even carry it so far as to totally abstain from total abstinence itself.”

- Mark Twain, autograph inscription in album to Mrs. Rutherford B. Hayes, reported in The Washington Post, June 11, 1881

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

—William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18

“People who know no self-restraint lead stormy and disordered lives, passing their time in a state of fear commensurate with the injuries they do to others, never able to relax.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

Cold water is the drink for me
Of all the drinks the best, sir;
Your grog, of whate’er name it be,
I dare not for to taste, sir.

The Temperance Movement generated a lot of songs like this one, set to the tune of Yankee Doodle.

From Lyrics and Borrowed Tunes of the American Temperance Movement., collected and edited by Paul D. Sanders, University of Missouri Press, 2006.