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Life's Pleasures Quote by Margaret Cho

"I love drugs, but I hate hangovers, and the hatred of the hangover wins by a landslide every time"

About this Quote

Cho’s line lands because it refuses the tidy moral arc people expect from “drugs” talk. No sermon, no scandalized confession. Just a brutally practical cost-benefit analysis, delivered with the deadpan efficiency of someone who’s done the math. The joke isn’t that she loves drugs; it’s that the hangover, that unglamorous tax on escapism, is what finally enforces sobriety. Desire doesn’t get defeated by virtue. It gets defeated by logistics.

The specific intent is classic Cho: puncture the fantasy while keeping the appetite intact. She lets “I love drugs” sit there as a deliberately provocative opener, then swerves into a complaint so mundane it’s almost suburban. That contrast is the engine. It drags a taboo subject into the realm of everyday annoyances, where it becomes legible and, crucially, funny. The “landslide” is doing extra work: it borrows the language of elections to frame self-control as a democratic decision, as if the body votes and the body is overwhelmingly anti-morning-after.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of how we romanticize altered states while ignoring aftermath. Cho positions herself not as a cautionary tale but as a competent narrator of her own impulses, using humor to claim agency. In the broader context of her comedy - candid, confessional, and built on undercutting shame - it’s also a way of talking about coping without begging for absolution. The laugh comes from recognition: most people don’t quit what hurts them because they “should,” they quit because the price stops being worth it.

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TopicWitty One-Liners
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Margaret Cho quote on pleasure and hangovers
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Margaret Cho (born December 5, 1968) is a Comedian from USA.

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