Joe Eszterhas Quotes

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.

Smoking cigarettes seems to alarm peace activists much more than voting for Reagan does.

I would be very proud to have influenced anyone that I know or don't know to quit smoking.

Tolerance of public smoking promotes the addiction.

Figuring that smoking kills about a third of all those who smoke, this tax could prevent the premature death of at least 2 million Americans alive today.

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

My mother, Marnie Fahr Steyer, was a lifelong smoker - up to three packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day. I like to think that, if Mom were still with us today, she'd be happy with the strides we've made to protect our children from the ongoing health crisis of tobacco addiction.

Smoking is definitely not cool anymore, and the folks who have worked against that have done a great job.

Discouraging smoking and drinking is a left ideal.

Whether talking about addiction, taxation [on cigarettes] or education [about smoking], there is always at the center of the conversation an essential conundrum: How come we're selling this deadly stuff anyway?

British scientists have demonstrated that cigarettes can harm your children. Fair enough. Use an ashtray!

We're loaning money for tobacco at below market rates of interest, and then we're spending money to tell people not to use the product.

Cigarettes are bad, but taxes and big government are worse.

If anti-smoking laws caused every smoker to smoke just one less cigarette a day, our company would stand to lose $92 million in sales annually. I assure you we don't intend to let that happen without a fight.

Tobacco is a culture productive of infinite wretchedness.

This is not a prohibitive society. We're not going to tell people they can't smoke. We learned that we can't tell people they can't drink.

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.

To some extent … everybody is resistant to change. Today, you’d be hard-pressed to find anybody that was opposed to the smoking ban … All of Western Europe followed New York City. Many of the states around here did. Every major city, including in the tobacco-growing states in the United States, did. Brazil is smoke-free. Mexico City is smoke-free. All of France, Italy, Spain, England—they’re all smoke-free.

Historically, tobacco control was not a partisan issue in American politics. Neither major party favored it. Republicans were sympathetic to corporate interests and Democrats were dominant in states where tobacco was grown and manufactured. However, beginning in the late 1960s Republicans began replacing Democrats in the South … and that liberated the Democrats to be the party of tobacco opposition.

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

Tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States. Smoking harms nearly every organ in the body and causes cancer, heart disease, stroke, respiratory illness, and many other health problems.

By the way, what happened to our surgeon general who warned us about AIDS and smoking? That position has been completely stripped of power.

As a mom, grandma and governor of Iowa, I believe we have an opportunity and a responsibility to combat the teen vaping epidemic.

Anti-smoking sentiment has replaced middle-class morality entirely. The smoker has taken the place of the homosexual. Today you hear people say things about smokers that used to be said about homosexuals - they pollute the environment; you don't want them around your children.

If you don’t smoke, I don’t know why.