Quotes about Tobacco

Chicago Tribune

In his personal habits, Mr. Lincoln is as simple as a child…his food is plain and nutritious. He never drinks intoxicating liquors of any sort… He is not addicted to tobacco.

Note the observation about tobacco. Even then it was recognized as addicting despite the testimonies of tobacco executives who lied in Congressional Testimony more than 100 years later

Winston Churchill

My rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before, after, and if need be during all meals and the intervals between them.

Eddie Vedder

I'm over smoking. You know, I feel like I've gone on long hikes and gotten to the top of the mountain and I'm looking at something beautiful, some great huge landscape, and there's some of the cleanest air that's on the planet. And then I light up, and say, "Ahh, what a great smoking moment this is!" So it's something evil that's taken over, and I want control over it.

Calvin Coolidge

… Smoking sets a bad example.

The President smoked cigars but never in public:

Carrie Nation

I want all hellions to quit puffing that hell fume in God's clean air.

Martha Plimpton

Cigarettes are an instant signifier in culture. It punctuates a joke, or puts that extra zing on a punch line. I like them as a prop. I think it can be really useful for character and texture and contrast and all of that.

Johnny Depp

I love to smoke. I wish I had more than two hands so I can hold more cigars

Jefferson Davis

Let fields be devoted exclusively to the production of corn, oats, beans, peas, potatoes, and other food for man and beast; let corn be sown broadcast for fodder... and let all your efforts be directed to the prompt supply of these articles in the districts where our armies are operating.

Historically, this quotation shows the desperate condition of the 1863 food supply in the Confederacy. The most profitable crops were cotton and tobacco. However, Davis and other Southern leaders had to urge patriotic Southerners to abandon those crops in favor of foodstuffs and fodder for the military and their horses. Some did but many did not.

Arlo Guthrie

What's in that pipe that he's smoking?

George Sherwood Dickerman

The taxes derived from distilled and malt liquors and from tobacco, as reported by the United States Commissioner, in 1912 amounted to $290,250,000. This was considerably more than the entire congressional appropriations for the army and navy; and in sixteen months these taxes pour into the treasury more than the estimated cost of the Panama Canal.

This historical quotation is surprising to us over a century later. We are surprised at the very large revenue from the then relatively low tax rates on alcohol and tobacco and many people who did not pay their taxes at the time. Also, the incredibly small appropriation for the military. WWI was only 4 years away. Generally, until the Second World War, the Democratic party did not advocate large military expenditures and the Republicans were more isolationist and opposed almost all defense spending. After WWII, the Republican Party flip flopped and became the champion of military readiness and defense spending.

Leonard Cohen

Does anybody have a cigarette? I'm looking forward to that first smoke. I've been looking forward to [it] for about 30 years.

Friedrich Engels

If ... the taking over the tobacco trade by the state was socialistic, Napoleon and Metternich would rank among the founders of Socialism.

Ira Berlin

Slavery was not one thing, it was many different things. It was different in cities than in the countryside. It was different on plantations than on farms. And in the 19th century slavery was changing rapidly. At the beginning of the 19th century most slaves grew rice or tobacco. At the end of slavery in 1863 most slaves were growing cotton

Bill Clinton

We must help parents protect their children from the gravest health threat that they face -- an epidemic of teen smoking, spread by multimillion dollar marketing campaigns. I challenge Congress -- let's pass bipartisan, comprehensive legislation that will improve public health, protect our tobacco farmers and change the way tobacco companies do business forever. Let's do what it takes to bring teen smoking down. Let's raise the price of cigarettes by up to $1.50 a pack over the next 10 years with penalties on the tobacco industry if it keeps marketing to our children.

James Carville

Tom Delay is a bag man for cigarette companies.

Milton Friedman

If there is a good case to be made for the illegalization of drugs, there is a better case to be made for the illegalization for tobacco and alcohol.

Friedman was an advocate for the legalization of illicit drugs, claiming that the harm that is done by making drugs illegal is greater than that which would occur if drugs were legalized. He also observed that alcohol kills times the number of Americans than does illegal drugs and tobacco kills four times as many as alcohol.

Samuel Green

Thousands and tens of thousands die of diseases of the lungs generally brought on by tobacco smoking.... How is it possible to be otherwise? Tobacco is a poison

Bill Hicks

I'm not really a heavy smoker any more. I only get through two lighters a day now.

George Dennison Prentice

Some things are better eschewed than chewed; tobacco is one of them.

Tommy Chong

Cigarettes, I won't do cigarettes, nicotine will kill ya.

Phillip Morris Company

We recognize that we create a product that is harmful and causes serious disease.

This was the first cigarette company that admitted what by then had been known by the cigarette companies for almost 50 years during which they continued to knowingly kill people and deny that there was any harm that could come from smoking.

Claire Forlani

I look at smoking as a crutch, and as an actor I would like strip away as many crutches as possible.

Jay Leno

I’ve been hosting the Today Show for 22 years. When I started, marijuana was illegal, and you could smoke cigarettes anywhere you wanted.

Marijuana had been made legal in a number of states at that time. Based on the example of New York City, many other cities of the world were just then passing ordinances to make it illegal to smoke in any public place or any private establishment that serves the public.

Thomas Mann

I never can understand how anyone can not smoke it deprives a man of the best part of life. With a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him, literally.

Thomas J. Bollyky

[Worldwide] … tobacco use … kills more people annually than HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined.

Tobacco Quotes