Ed Markey Quotes

I don't smoke, but people say that you get secondhand smoke. But this is a country that was founded mainly on the tobacco industry - tobacco and coffee. It's so surprising that they are now essentially making cigarettes illegal, when that is where the whole country came from.

If somebody invented cigarettes today, the government would not legalize them.

I was a militant smoker, and in my case, I think I particularly used smoking because what I felt was a kind of politically correct big brother assault on smoking.

I support workplace clean air. But a federal ban on smoking would mean that you couldn't smoke in your own home. I don't care what people do in their home.

We can no longer tolerate losing one more innocent child or putting one more firefighter at risk in a fire that could have been prevented at the cost of pennies by making a couple simple changes to the construction of a cigarette.

It is illegal for any person, firm, or corporation to sell, offer to sell, or to bring into the state for the purpose of selling, giving away, or otherwise disposing of, any cigarettes, cigarette paper, or substitute for the same

Does your desire to smoke anywhere, at any time, trump the right of others to breathe clean air … ? … The need to breathe clean air is more important than the license to pollute it.

Tolerance of public smoking promotes the addiction.

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.

I'm against cigarettes, always.

They used to have a smoking section at most airports. No more. They now have these glass-encased rooms. You're not just a smoker, you're an example to other people. You're an exhibit at a futuristic zoo.

Why should we be letting people smoke their cigars in their comfortable chairs in Raqqa?

One would understand a ban on surrogate advertising, but to completely ban [smoking] is ridiculous, a joke taken too far.

It is now proved beyond doubt that smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics.

Mom was a smoker. My grandfather was a smoker. My aunts were smokers. My uncles were smokers. I don't know any smokers now, not even my mom.

I was turning down cigarette campaigns before it became fashionable. I wouldn't let CBS Radio sell 'The Stan Freberg Show' to R.J. Reynolds and American Tobacco, which had sponsored Jack Benny, the man I replaced.

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.

Cigarettes are not a part of human behaviour, they are a habit.

We don't want to come off as pro-smoking. Even though we didn't smoke real cigarettes at all, you want to be careful of people's sensitivities.

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.

I'm still strongly opposed to antismoking laws, strongly opposed to any law that regulates personal behavior.

In Hollywood you can't even smoke in a bar anymore and yet in the movies they're always showing people smoking. I don't get it.

Sure, it is apparent that presidents are looking at polls, but they are also stepping up on issues. President Clinton stepped up on tobacco. He shaped the polls on the tobacco issue.

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.

With you at HEW, Carter has no chance to carry North Carolina, Virginia, or Kentucky – and maybe even Connecticut, where they make cigars. That anti-smoking campaign will kill him.