Quotes about smoking (632 quotes, page 7)

“A policeman is a charlatan who offers, in return for obedience, to protect him (a) from his superiors, (b) from his equals, and (c) from himself. This last service, under democracy, is commonly the most esteemed of them all. In the United States, at least theoretically, it is the only thing that keeps ice-wagon drivers, Y.M.C.A. secretaries, insurance collectors and other such human camels from smoking opium, ruining themselves in the night clubs, and going to Palm Beach with Follies girls”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

1920s, Notes on Democracy (1926)
Context: What the common man longs for in this world, before and above all his other longings, is the simplest and most ignominious sort of peace: the peace of a trusty in a well-managed penitentiary. He is willing to sacrifice everything else to it. He puts it above his dignity and he puts it above his pride. Above all, he puts it above his liberty. The fact, perhaps, explains his veneration for policemen, in all the forms they take–his belief that there is a mysterious sanctity in law, however absurd it may be in fact.
A policeman is a charlatan who offers, in return for obedience, to protect him (a) from his superiors, (b) from his equals, and (c) from himself. This last service, under democracy, is commonly the most esteemed of them all. In the United States, at least theoretically, it is the only thing that keeps ice-wagon drivers, Y. M. C. A. secretaries, insurance collectors and other such human camels from smoking opium, ruining themselves in the night clubs, and going to Palm Beach with Follies girls... Under the pressure of fanaticism, and with the mob complacently applauding the show, democratic law tends more and more to be grounded upon the maxim that every citizen is, by nature, a traitor, a libertine, and a scoundrel. In order to dissuade him from his evil-doing the police power is extended until it surpasses anything ever heard of in the oriental monarchies of antiquity.

Democracy , Girl , Night

“Ecology is the science of everything. Nobody knows everything. Nobody even knows everything about any one thing. And most of us don't know much. Say it's ten-thirty on a Saturday night. Where are your teenage children? I didn't ask where they said they were going. Where are they really? What are they doing? Who are they with? Have you met the other kids' families? And what is tonight's pot smoking, wine-cooler drinking, and sex in the backseats of cars going to mean in a hundred years? Now extend these questions to the entire solar system.”

P. J. O'Rourke (1947) American journalist

All the Trouble in the World (1994)

Children , Family , Sex , Cars

“We must pass like smoke or live within the spirit's fire;
For we can no more than smoke unto the flame return”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)
Context: We must pass like smoke or live within the spirit's fire;
For we can no more than smoke unto the flame return
If our thought has changed to dream, our will unto desire,
As smoke we vanish though the fire may burn.

“Continuously thou wilt look at human things as smoke and nothing at all”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

X, 31
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book X
Context: Continuously thou wilt look at human things as smoke and nothing at all; especially if thou reflectest at the same time, that what has once changed will never exist again in the infinite duration of time. But thou, in what a brief space of time is thy existence? And why art thou not content to pass through this short time in an orderly way?

“Unfortunately, once I did learn to smoke, I couldn't stop. I escalated to two packs a day very quickly, and stayed that way for about ten years. When I decided to stop, I adopted the method that my father had used when he quit. He would carry a cigarette in his shirt pocket, and every time he felt like smoking, he would pull out the cigarette and confront it: «Who stronger? You? Me?» Always the answer was the same: «I stronger.» Back the cigarette would go, until the next craving. It worked for him, and it worked for me. ”

Kirk Douglas (1916–2020) American stage and film actor

Way , Learning , Time

“People copy, people steal. Most of the pictures they make nowadays are loaded down with
special effects. I couldn’t do that. I quit smoking because I couldn’t reload my Zippo.”

Billy Wilder (1906–2002) American filmmaker

Making love , People

“Look at the manner in which the aborigines are swept away from continent after continent by the sword and beverage of the Aryans. See how the red children of America have been cheated and debauched and driven from homes where they and their fathers had lived from immemorial generations. When the banner of Castile first furled in Bahama breezes, America was inhabited by a noble, magnanimous, and happy people. They were not like the sodden, suspicious, revengeful remnants that to-day huddle on barricaded reserves, the vindictive survivors of four centuries of injustice. They were kind and generous. They came to the invading Europeans as children, with minds of wonder and with hands filled with presents. They were treated by the invaders like refuse. They were plundered, and their outstretched hands cut off and fed to Spanish hounds. They are gone from the valleys where once their camp-smokes curled to heaven, and their quaint canoes ruffle the moonlight of the rivers no more. They that remain are too weak to rise in warlike challenge to the aggressions of the mighty white. But the story of the meeting of the pale and the red, and of the wrongs of the vanquished red, will remain as one of the mournful tales of this world when the kindred of Lo, like fleecy clouds, have melted into the infinite azure of the past.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Preponderance of Egoism, p. 133–134

Home , Cheating , Past , Children

“It was deshbhakti which inspired Gandhi ji’s freedom struggle. It is deshbhakti which is powering the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. It is deshbhakti which is powering the movement to ensure smoke-free lives to women. It is deshbhakti which is powering the movement to give houses to all the poor in India. It is deshbhakti which is powering the movement to provide electricity to all homes. Deshbhakti is not a disease. Just as hyper-secularism was invented to strike at the root of India’s culture and ethos, similarly the terminology of hyper nationalism has been invented to portray deshbhakti in poor light.”

Narendra Modi (1950) Prime Minister of India

2019, "2014 was a mandate for hope and aspiration, 2019 is about confidence and acceleration", 2019

Home , Housing , Freedom , Light

“Ever since I’d shown my bleeding arms to my sweetheart we hadn’t spoken a word. I’d simply decided to wait until she told me she appreciated carved tatoos. But she never did. She just ignored my obvious suffering. The pain in my gut, the secret gnawing at my belly didn’t concern her one damn bit. Things got so bad for me I finally took to smoking like all my buddies were already doing. I rolled up whole pages of old funny books and smoked the shit until my lungs ached. I’d cut vines from the ivy that crawled up the sides of the chicken coop and puff on my homemade cigars until my head buzzed.”

Oscar Zeta Acosta book Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

Source: Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), p. 91.

Pain , Waiting , Bad luck , Suffering

“I’d rather you didn’t smoke in here.”

Richard K. Morgan book Altered Carbon

“Kawahara, I’d rather you died of an internal hemorrhage, but I don’t suppose you’ll oblige me.”
Source: Altered Carbon (2002), Chapter 25 (p. 319)

“While others used the staircase, he used the elevator to stardom. I don’t think any other actor in cinema made cigarette smoking a such an asset to his repertoire.”

Rajinikanth (1950) Indian actor

K. Balachander, in p. 14
Rajinikanth: A Birthday Special (12 December 2012)

Thinking

“Shaun: Smoking: It has been found that 25,000 people die each day from smoking related illnesses. But scientists have proved, conclusively, that this number would be halved if divided by two.”

Shaun Micallef (1962) Australian actor

The Micallef P(r)ogram(me)

People , Relation ships

“He is thinner, taller, younger – more boyish-looking – than expected, but he is also the shyest and most nervous human being I have ever seen. He chews not merely his nails but his fingers, twitches his pouty mouth and chin, chain-smokes, wiggles his nose in constant adjustment of his spectacles, looks querulous one moment and ready to cry the next. His hands tremble, he stutters, his whole frame wobbles when he shakes hands…There is no betrayal of the thoughts behind those frightened, very intelligent eyes.”

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) Russian composer and pianist

Robert Craft, journal entry for October 1, 1962; published in Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft Dialogues and Diary (1968) pp. 291-2.

Betrayal , Cry , Intelligence

“You are generous and your voice is blessed. When I was sick with back problems, you even made a promise to quit smoking if I´d recover. Only a great friend can do this.”

Simone Bittencourt de Oliveira (1949) Brazilian singer

Xuxa

Problem

“Put away these frozenjawed primates and their annals of ways beset and ultimate dark. What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as in this flesh. This mawky wormbent tabernacle.”

Cormac McCarthy book Suttree

page 130
Suttree (1979)

Way , God , Soul

“You are twenty-two years old, trained down to the last pound like a boxer. You do not over-eat, smoke or drink and you work six to eight hours a day at a piano with a special keyboard in which the keys are so hard to press down that when you come to your concert grand at night you seem, literally, to be riding a fleecy cloud, so easy is its keyboard action. Before each concert, of course, you eat nothing at all.”

George Antheil (1900–1959) American avant-garde composer, pianist, author and inventor

Training , Drink , Night

“Once you grasp the staggering differences between black and white neighborhoods, it becomes much easier to explain a whole realm of phenomena. Take the achievement gap between middle-class black students and their white peers. It’s easy to look at this and jump to cultural explanations—that this is a function of black culture and not income or wealth. But, when we say middle-class black kids are more likely to live in poor neighborhoods, what we’re also saying is that they’re less likely to have social networks with professionals, and more likely to be exposed to violence and crime. This can have serious consequences. Youthful experimentation for a white teenager in a suburb might be smoking a joint in a friend’s attic. Youthful experimentation for a black teenager might be hanging out with gang members.”

Jamelle Bouie (1987) American columnist and political correspondent

Down and Out, 2014

Wealth , Youth

“Just now I'm painting a beautiful woman, smiling, burnt to a crisp, with feathers of all colors, held up by a small die of burning marble; the die is in turn held up by a little puff of smoke, churned and quite; in the sky there are asses with parrot-heads, grasses and beach sand, all about to explode, all clean, incredible objective..”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Quote in Dali's letter to his art-friend Lorca, 1927; as quoted in Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War, Robin Adèle Greeley, p. 67
Dali is striving then for a rational approach of his paintings; he is very probably referring to his painting, he made earlier in 1927: ' Little Ashes' https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Little_Ashes.jpg
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1920 - 1930

Painting , Smile , Beauty , Grass

“Write your own name and your sweetheart's, with the smoke of a candle on the roof of the kitchen, or the servants hall, to show your learning.”

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

Learning

“What I really remember is that people camped out everywhere, and the fact everybody expected it might turn into a big nightmare with all sorts of hassles because back in those days everybody was smoking pot and taking acid.”

Johnny Rivers (1942) American musician

Johnny Rivers Quotes - Johnny Rivers Quotations, Famous Sayings - FamousFix - Page 2. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.famousfix.com/topic/johnny-rivers/quotes?pageno=2.

People

“Everyone's got peer pressure at this age. I mean there's pressure to smoke, there's pressure to do all sorts of stuff. And, um, I've never been affected by peer pressure. Never.”

Justin Trudeau (1971) 23rd Prime Minister of Canada; eldest son of Pierre Trudeau

Source: An eighteen-year-old Trudeau on supporting the minority-held position https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6B8IrpWVaoE of Québec federalism among his fellow students at Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coll%C3%A8ge_Jean-de-Br%C3%A9beuf, late 1980s
Context: before leading Liberals

Age

“Look, working nine, ten years old at the farm, I was not harmed at all. When a nine-year-old, ten-year-old goes to work somewhere, it's full of people there. Now, when I'm smoking a crack pipe, nobody says anything. [...] But I want to say that I, my older brother, a sister of mine, a little younger, at that age, eight, nine, ten, twelve years, worked on the farm.”

Jair Bolsonaro (1955) Brazilian president elect

In a live social media broadcast on 4 July 2019, defending child labor. Bolsonaro Defends Child Labor https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/brazil/2019/07/bolsonaro-defends-child-labor.shtml. Folha de S.Paulo (5 July 2019).
2019

Sister , People , Age

“In the age of wooden television in the South where I grew up, leisure involved sitting on screened porches, smoking cigarettes, drinking iced tea, engaging in conversation, and staring into space. It might also involve fishing. Sometimes the Web does remind me of fishing.”

William Gibson book Distrust That Particular Flavor

"The Net Is a Waste of Time," The New York Times Magazine, July 14, 1996.
Distrust That Particular Flavor (2012)

Fish , Drink , Age , Tea

“Live, shit, drinking and smoking should be the daily bread of all poets.”

Charles Bukowski book Notes of a Dirty Old Man

Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1969)

Drink

“Simplicity of life, even the barest, is not a misery, but the very foundation of refinement: a sanded floor and whitewashed walls, and the green trees, and flowery meads, and living waters outside; or a grimy palace amid the smoke with a regiment of housemaids always working to smear the dirt together so that it may be unnoticed; which, think you, is the most refined, the most fit for a gentleman of those two dwellings?
So I say, if you cannot learn to love real art; at least learn to hate sham art and reject it. It is not because the wretched thing is so ugly and silly and useless that I ask you to cast it from you; it is much more because these are but the outward symbols of the poison that lies within them; look through them and see all that has gone to their fashioning, and you will see how vain labour, and sorrow, and disgrace have been their companions from the first — and all this for trifles that no man really needs!”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

Speech, London (10 March 1880)

Tree , Hate , Love , Learning

“Thick smoke like a herd of black horses was rising over the massive building and being blown around by the wind.”

Ismail Kadare book Chronicle in Stone

Ismail Kadare, Chronicle in Stone

Horse

“Who would dare invite such a smoke? To some it might be healing, but to others, bane. Breathed in at the nostrils, it seemed to fill the eyes and ears and brain. To a man who knew many things, it would reveal many more, to a man who knew little it would reveal too much. Its name was self-knowledge.”

Tanith Lee Tales from the Flat Earth

Tales from the Flat Earth, Night's Master (1978)
Source: Book 3 “The World’s Lure”, Chapter 4 “The Anger of the Magicians” (p. 163)

Knowledge

“There is that mirror−world ingestion of archaic substances, she thinks: People smoke, and drink as though it were good for you, and seem to still be in some sort of honeymoon phase with cocaine.”

William Gibson Blue Ant trilogy

Source: Blue Ant trilogy, Pattern Recognition (2003), Chapter 1, "The Website of Dreadful Night"

Drink , People , World , Thinking

“They lie about marijuana. Tell you pot-smoking makes you unmotivated. Lie! When you're high, you can do everything you normally do just as well—you just realize that it's not worth the fucking effort. There is a difference.”

Bill Hicks (1961–1994) American comedian

Source: Revelations (1993)

Marijuana , Lie , Effort

“Healthcare is the field which should go ahead, like smoke from a steam train.”

Viktor Yanukovych (1950) Ukrainian politician who was the President of Ukraine

2012
Source: [Янукович: Медицина должна идти впереди, как дым от паровоза, https://zn.ua/POLITICS/yanukovich_meditsina_dolzhna_idti_vperedi,_kak_dym_ot_parovoza_.html, 2022-06-12, Mirror Weekly]

Training

“My employer is a miser
His approach has me nerved
He exports our cash abroad
While pay here is inadequate
And my eviction has been served

I joined the labour movement
To get a better deal
Life to-day is miserable
My dignity they did steal

We have some great leaders
To halt the perpetual darken
In Cork we have Quill
Tipp there’s O’Brien
And in Dublin we’ve Big Jim Larkin

That poor young lad in town
Factory smoke he’s been snortin’
Jolly good thing that in the Dáil
He has our man Bill Norton

My employer was a miser
His approach had me nerved
But thanks to the Knights of Labour
Justice has been served.”

Sean O'Connor

Primary source work
Source: Scrap print from Irish Labour history group

Life , Justice

“We're so inconsistent about what we let kill ya. "Smoking? Must be eradicated. Marijuana? Zero tolerance." But there's lots of ways to kill yourself. You know what I think kills you? Stress, and being a workaholic, and never getting laid, and, uh, McDonalds, and staying mad at people, and lying for a living, and three-martini lunches, and the all-American breakfast, and whatever Elvis was doing. That's what kills you.”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

Be More Cynical (2000)

People , Marijuana , Lying , Madness

Quotes about smoking page 7

Quotes about smoking
page 7