Joe Eszterhas Quotes

I started making a point earlier that women's cancer rates are skyrocketing, and we have some women movie stars, young women movie stars, who are smoking in many of their movies.

When I care about something, I care about something. I think I have an obligation as an American to - and as a citizen, as - as a human being, to help others. Smoking is going to kill a billion people this century. I've put six hundred million dollars from my own money into trying to stop the tobacco companies from getting kids to smoke and convincing adults that it's not in their health.

I think the anti-smoking business is a yuppie invention-an extension of the concept that "we'll always be young, rich, and healthy.

They're talking about banning cigarette smoking now in any place that's used by ten or more people in a week, which, I guess, means that Madonna can't even smoke in bed.

I think it's horrible that people have to be told. Don't smoke! Everybody knows it's bad for the health. But they have to forbid it.

The culture is about moving to a place where tobacco and smoking isn't part of normal life: people don't encounter it normally, they don't see it in their big supermarkets, they don't see people smoking in public places, they don't see tobacco vending machines.

Get me well so I can get on television and tell people to stop smoking.

WHO has transformed its war against smoking to a war against smokers.

Getting cigarettes out of the hands of kids before they get hooked, is family values.

When you are young, you admire the people you see on TV and you want to have the same gestures and the same attitudes and behave in the same way. It is a responsibility.

I'm against cigarettes, always.

I will focus on smoking in movies and with the amount of time that I have left in the world, I will do the best I can to stop smoking in movies and also to help people stop smoking, just normal ordinary people who may need help.

I'm not attempting to be a role model but I accept that roles I've played put me in that position. I don't feel a huge responsibility as an actress to put my young fan base first.

I got this big fear of doing smoking jokes in my act and showing up five years from now goin' [puts mic to his neck and speaks as if he had a mechanical larynx] 'good evening everybody, remember me, smoking's bad. [puts cigarette to neck and mimics smoking it] Eeww. You ever seen somebody do that? I've seen someone do that. Let me tell you something — if you're smoking out of a hole in your neck [mimics it again] I'd think about quitting. And that's just me, ya know.

I hear all of these liberals so concerned with people's health and so critical of tobacco cause it kills, it's deadly, and secondhand and third, and they've created a bunch of insane people out there. I'm telling you, liberalism has created literally deranged people afraid of everything. I mean it makes no sense to be afraid of secondhand smoke a hundred yards away from it. They have created this. They have created this inordinate fear of ordinary, everyday life.

I didn't ask to become a role model, but it was thrust upon all of us, regardless of whether you acknowledge it. You have to come to a decision as an adult and say, "I've got to live my life." There's nothing wrong with thinking ahead and being aware of how it might affect somebody - everything from a post to where you have dinner to who you're with. But these aren't things you can let consume your life.

I happen to be a movie star, but I'm not saying, "Hey, I'm a role model. Imitate me."

I thought you liberals cared about people, but here you're perfectly content to get them addicted to tobacco and make them pay taxes through the nose and continue to pay taxes through the nose and raise their taxes. And then you try to make 'em think you care about 'em by running PSAs telling them how they shouldn't smoke and how they should quit. You're exactly right. If they really cared, they would ban the product, but they can't, because the revenue from tobacco taxes - I'm not kidding you - funds children's health care programs, and a number of other things as well.

I could get drunk and run around Nashville naked. But I won't because I want to set a good example for my fans. I think they deserve to have a role model.

When you idolise someone, or you hold someone in such high regard, you just want them to be everything that you think there are - and when they are it's just lovely.

I realized in order to be involved in health policy, you really had to understand more than the individual patient that we as physicians, are taught to think about.

When people call me a role model it puts the fear of god into me, because I feel like I'm destined to fail.

A lot of women were betting on me because there were so few role models and I let them down. They had put me on a pedestal. I maybe enjoyed being in that limelight, but I couldn't reverse what I had done.

Of tobacco and its consequences, I will say nothing but that the practice is at too bad a pass to leave hope that anything that could be said in books would work a cure. If the floors of boarding-houses, and the decks of steam-boats, and the carpets of the Capitol, do not sicken the Americans into a reform; if the warnings of physicians are of no avail, what remains to be said? I dismiss the nauseous subject.

The state of New York's got this group of people called smokers, and they know they're addicted, and despite all the efforts to make 'em quit, they know they can't. So they just see a pile of money when they see these people. And they think because they're addicted, they can't not buy the product, so they just keep raising taxes and raising taxes, and they expect people just to come up with the money from somewhere and pay it.