Michael Bloomberg Quotes

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.

According to the comprehensive Global Burden of Disease project, the leading risk factors for ill health and premature death are linked to lifestyle, what we eat and drink and how much we exercise. Disease prevention does not occur in the hospital. We need the whole of society to be involved.

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.

Tolerance of public smoking promotes the addiction.

Tobacco is a culture productive of infinite wretchedness.

I've treated so many adults who are desperate - desperate - to get off tobacco. They all started as kids. I see the industry getting another generation of our kids addicted.

It's not about giving back if you're successful or a celebrity or how much money you have: it's about your responsibility as an adult to help others.

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

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.

The worst drug of all by far is tobacco; the death toll from tobacco is just overwhelming.

There are certainly a lot of sins to be taken on. To take on smoking and movies is a weighty enough thing, I think, and it's one I've experienced, and it's what's caused me to live in-with my voice maimed for the rest of my life.

We know how unhealthy it is. I know what happens, though - young women start smoking because they don't think they're really going to keep smoking.

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.

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.

Think about all the selfish non-smokers out there, driving around on asphalt, drinking water out of the tap, not even thinking about how smokers' taxes help pay for it all.

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 think the spirit of America, one American wanting to make another American's life better, or internationally our desire to see countries do better, or people in countries do better, coming from this concept of volunteerism is a very valid and important part of our internal being.

I think the point of America, our planet, the reason we're all here, one of the best things that we can do is be concerned about something even when it doesn't concern us. That's the whole point. The fact that I've never had to use a Planned Parenthood, the fact that I've never been in need of medical services I couldn't afford or didn't have access to, doesn't mean I shouldn't be concerned about the fact that other women don't have that access.

Don't let tobacco companies make the choices for you... they care about their own well-being, not yours

Don't smoke. Don't kill yourselves. Don't maim yourselves. Tell your friends. Please don't smoke.

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

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.

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

I do want to make a special appeal to women movie stars to, I think, have a special responsibility these days to stop smoking, not to do it up on screen because the example that's being set is really an awful example.

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.