Life's Pleasures Quote by Betty Ford

Betty Ford’s genius here is that she treats sobriety not as deprivation but as a linguistic problem you can solve in public, in real time. The line is practical, almost chatty, yet it quietly overturns the social script that makes non-drinking feel like an awkward confession. “Of course I drink” is a small act of reclamation: it refuses the false binary where drinking equals alcohol and everything else equals abstinence-as-virtue or abstinence-as-lack. She gives patients a sentence that restores normalcy, then hands them permission to use it.

The subtext is about power and shame. Addiction thrives in secrecy; recovery often gets policed by etiquette. People want to be “polite,” so they tiptoe around alcohol, as if naming it might trigger relapse or expose discomfort. Ford flips the burden back onto the room. If someone assumes you “don’t drink,” you don’t have to accept the role of the fragile exception. You can correct them with calm certainty, signaling that you’re not broken, you’re choosing.

Context matters: Ford wasn’t just a private citizen trading coping tips. As First Lady, she helped drag alcoholism and dependency into daylight, then institutionalized that candor through the Betty Ford Center. Her phrasing carries that cultural project in miniature: normalize the conversation, make recovery speakable, and let a person’s identity be larger than their diagnosis. It’s stigma reduction disguised as good manners.