I am of course notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other. ~ Kurt Vonnegut
Generally, the control freaks only increase control. Take cigarettes. At first it was just warning labels. Then, bans on t.v. ads. Then they required restaurants to have no-smoking sections. Then came the bans on airplanes, schools, workplaces, entire restaurants, then bars, too—and now, sometimes, apartments and outdoor spaces, even. ~ John Stossel

Tobacco is a product prepared from the leaves of the tobacco plant by curing them. The plant is part of the genus Nicotiana and of the w:Solanaceae (nightshade) family. Tobacco contains the alkaloid nicotine, which is a stimulant. Dried tobacco leaves are mainly used for smoking in cigarettes, cigars, pipe tobacco, and flavored shisha tobacco. They can be also consumed as snuff, chewing tobacco, dipping tobacco and snus.

Quotes

  • The money expended for liquor and tobacco is the difference between a young man making a success in life and making a failure.
  • He who doth not smoke hath either known no great griefs, or refuseth himself the softest consolation, next to that which comes from heaven.
  • Woman in this scale, the weed in that, Jupiter, hang out thy balance, and weigh them both; and if thou give the preference to woman, all I can say is, the next time Juno ruffles thee—O Jupiter, try the weed.
  • Tobacco, divine, rare superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all panaceas, potable gold and philosopher's stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases.
  • After he had administer'd a dose
    Of snuff mundungus to his nose;
    And powder'd th' inside of his skull,
    Instead of th' outward jobbernol,
    He shook it with a scornful look
    On th' adversary, and thus he spoke.
  • Divine in hookas, glorious in a pipe
    When tipp'd with amber, mellow, rich, and ripe; …
    Yet thy true lovers more admire by far
    Thy naked beauties - give me a cigar!
  • your life is in your hands, to make of it what you choose.
  • I'm gettin' tired of guys who smoke pipes. When are they gonna outlaw this shit? Guy with a fuckin' pipe! It's an arrogant thing to place a burning barrier between you and the rest of the world. It's supposed to imply thoughtfulness or intelligence. It's not intelligent to stand around with a controlled fire sticking out of your mouth. I say, "Hey, professor! You want somethin' hot to suck on? Call me! I'll give ya somethin' to put in your mouth!" I think these pipe-smokers oughta just move to the next level and go ahead and suck a dick. There's nothing wrong with suckin' dicks. Men do it, women do it; can't be all bad if everybody's doin' it. I say, Drop the pipe, and go to the dick! That's my advice. I'm here to help.
  • Haven't we had about enough of this cigar smoking shit? When are these fat, arrogant, overfed, white-collar business criminals going to extinguish their cigars and move along to their next abomination? Soft, white, business pussies suckin' on a big brown dick. That's all it is, folks, a big, brown dick. You know, Freud used to say, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." Yeah? Well, sometimes it's a big brown dick! With a fat, criminal business asshole sucking on the wet end of it! But, hey. The news is not all bad for me. Not all bad. Want to hear the good part? Cancer of the mouth. Good! Fuck 'em! Makes me happy; it's an attractive disease. So light up, suspender-man, and suck that smoke deep down into your empty suit. And blow it out your ass, you miserable cocksucker!
  • The pipe, with solemn interposing puff,
    Makes half a sentence at a time enough;
    The dozing sages drop the drowsy strain,
    Then pause, and puff—and speak, and pause again.
  • Pernicious weed! whose scent the fair annoys
    Unfriendly to society's chief joys,
    Thy worst effect is banishing for hours
    The sex whose presence civilizes ours.
  • And a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.
  • For I hate, yet love thee, so,
    That, whichever thing I show,
    The plain truth will seem to be
    A constrained hyperbole,
    And the passion to proceed
    More from a mistress than a weed.
  • For thy sake, tobacco, I
    Would do anything but die.
  • Nay, rather,
    Plant divine, of rarest virtue;
    Blisters on the tongue would hurt you.
  • Thou in such a cloud dost bind us,
    That our worst foes cannot find us,
    And ill fortune, that would thwart us,
    Shoots at rovers, shooting at us;
    While each man, through thy height'ning steam,
    Does like a smoking Etna seem.
  • Thou through such a mist dost show us,
    That our best friends do not know us.
  • What this country needs is a really good 5-cent cigar.
    • Thomas Riley Marshall, Vice President under Woodrow Wilson, to Henry M. Rose, the assistant secretary of the Senate, while Marshall was presiding as president of the Senate. Reported in the New York Tribune (January 4, 1920), part 7, p. 1. Confirmed in Marshall's autobiography, Recollections of Thomas R. Marshall (1925), caption facing p. 244; and in Charles M. Thomas, Thomas Riley Marshall (1939), p. 175.
  • A good cigar is like a beautiful chick with a great body who also knows the American League box scores.
  • They threaten me with lung cancer, and still I smoke and smoke. If they'd only threaten me with hard work, I might stop.
  • Good food, good sex, good digestion, good sleep: to these basic animal pleasures, man has added nothing but the good cigarette.
  • Life without smoking is like the smoke without the roast.
  • Sir Plume, of amber snuff-box justly vain,
    And the nice conduct of a clouded cane.
  • Just where the breath of life his nostrils drew,
    A charge of snuff the wily virgin threw;
    The gnomes direct, to every atom just,
    The pungent grains of titillating dust,
    Sudden, with starting tears each eye o'erflows,
    And the high dome re-echoes to his nose.
  • Few people on this planet know what it is to be truly despised. Can you blame them? I earn a living fronting an organizing that kills one thousand two hundred human beings a day; 1200 people. We're talking two jumbo jet plane loads of men, women, and children. I mean there's Attila, Genghis, and me, Nick Naylor the face of cigarettes, the Colonel Saunders of nicotine. This is where I work, the Academy of Tobacco Studies. It was established by seven gentlemen you may recognize from C-Span. These guys realized quick if they were gonna claim cigarettes were not addictive they better have proof. This is the man they rely on, Erhardt Von Grupten Mundt. They found him in Germany. I won't go into the details, he's been testing the link between nicotine and lung cancer for thirty years, and hasn't found any conclusive results. The man's a genius, he could disprove gravity. Then we got our sharks. We draft them out of Ivy League law schools and give them timeshares and sports cars. It's just like a John Grisham novel. Well you know without all the espionage. Most importantly we got spin control. That's where I come in. I get paid to talk. I don't have an MD or law degree. I have a baccalaureate in kicking ass and taking names. You know that guy who can pick up any girl? I'm him, on crack.
  • In 1910, the US was producing ten billion cigarettes a year, by 1930 we were up to one hundred twenty three billion, what happened in between? Three things: a World War, Dieting and movies. [...] 1927, talking pictures are born. Suddenly directors need to give their actors something to do while they're talking. Cary Grant and Carole Lombard are lighting up, Bette Davis, a chimney, and Bogart, remember the first picture with him and Lauren Bacall? [...] She sort of shimmies in through the doorway. Nineteen years old. Pure sex. She says "Anyone got a match?" and Bogie throws the matches at her... and she catches them. Greatest romance in the century, how did it start? Lighting a cigarette. In these days, when someone smokes in the movies, they're either a psychopath... or an European. The message that Hollywood needs to send out is "Smoking is Cool!". We need the cast of, uh, Will & Grace smoking in their living room, Forrest Gump puffing away between his box of chocolates, Hugh Grant earning back the love of Julia Roberts by buying her favorite brand - her Virginia Slims. Most of the actors smoke already. If they start doing it on screen... We can put the sex back into cigarettes.
  • And 'twixt his finger and his thumb he held
    A pouncet-box, which ever and anon
    He gave his nose and took 't away again;
    Who therefor angry, when it next came there,
    Took it in snuff.
  • Divine Tobacco.
    • Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1589-96), Book III, Canto V, Stanza 32.
  • Generally, the control freaks only increase control.  Take cigarettes.  At first it was just warning labels.  Then, bans on t.v. ads.  Then they required restaurants to have no-smoking sections.  Then came the bans on airplanes, schools, workplaces, entire restaurants, then bars, too—and now, sometimes, apartments and outdoor spaces, even.
    • John Stossel, "Control Freaks," Stossel (4 December 2014), 9:56 PM ET
  • I am of course notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other.

Quotes about secondhand smoke

  • There is "no clear link" between secondhand smoke and lung cancer, a study led by researchers at Stanford University has found.

    After a decade-long study of more than 76,000 women, the researchers concluded that while there is still a strong association between smoking and lung cancer, there is no significant relationship between the cancer and exposure to passive smoke.

  • The results of the California CPS I cohort do not support a causal relation between exposure to environental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality, although they do not rule out a small effect.  Given the limitations of the underlying data in this and the other studies of environmental tobacco smoke and the small size of the risk, it seems premature to conclude that environmental tobacco smoke causes death from coronary heart disease and lung cancer.
  • A large prospective cohort study of more than 76,000 women confirmed a strong association between cigarette smoking and lung cancer but found no link between the disease and secondhand smoke.

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 803-06.
  • It's all one thing—both tend into one scope—
    To live upon Tobacco and on Hope,
    The one's but smoke, the other is but wind.
    • Sir Robert Aytoun, Sonnet on Tobacco.
  • The Elizabethan age might be better named the beginning of the smoking era.
  • Little tube of mighty pow'r,
    Charmer of an idle hour,
    Object of my warm desire.
    • Isaac Hawkins Browne, A Pipe of Tobacco. Parody in imitation of A. Phillips.
  • The man who smokes, thinks like a sage and acts like a Samaritan!
  • Tobacco, divine, rare superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all panaceas, potable gold and philosopher's stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases.
  • Sublime tobacco! which from east to west,
    Cheers the tar's labour or the Turkman's rest;
    Which on the Moslem's ottoman divides
    His hours, and rivals opium and his brides;
    Magnificent in Stamboul, but less grand,
    Though not less loved, in Wapping or the Strand:
    Divine in hookas, glorious in a pipe,
    When tipp'd with amber, mellow, rich, and ripe;
    Like other charmers wooing the caress,
    More dazzlingly when daring in full dress;
    Yet thy true lovers more admire by far
    Thy naked beauties—Give me a cigar!
  • Contented I sit with my pint and my pipe,
    Puffing sorrow and care far away,
    And surely the brow of grief nothing can wipe,
    Like smoking and moist'ning our clay;
    * * * * *
    For tho' at my simile many may joke,
    Man is but a pipe—and his life but smoke.
    • Content and a Pipe. Old ballad.
  • The Indian weed, withered quite,
    Green at noon, cut down at night,
    Shows thy decay.
    All flesh is hay.
    Thus think, then drink tobacco.
    * * * *
    And when the smoke ascends on high,
    Then thou behold'st vanity
    Of worldly stuff,
    Gone at a puff.
    Thus think, then drink tobacco.
    • Attributed to Erskine, Gospel Sonnets, Meditations on Tobacco, Part I. Printed in a Collection Two Broadsides against Tobacco (1672). Erskine claimed only Part II, Part I. is from an old poem.
  • Tobacco, an outlandish weed,
    Doth in the land strange wonders breed;
    It taints the breath, the blood it dries,
    It burns the head, it blinds the eyes;
    It dries the lungs, scourgeth the lights,
    It 'numbs the soul, it dulls the sprites;
    It brings a man into a maze,
    And makes him sit for others' gaze;
    It mars a man, it mars a purse,
    A lean one fat, a fat one worse;
    A white man black, a black man white,
    A night a day, a day a night;
    It turns the brain like cat in pan,
    And makes a Jack a gentleman.
    • Fairholt, J. Payne Collier's MS.
  • With pipe and book at close of day,
    Oh, what is sweeter? mortal say.
    • It matters not what book on knee,
      Old Isaak or the Odyssey,
      It matters not meerschaum or clay.
    • Richard Le Gallienne, in volumes in Folio. See Cope's Smoker's Garland.
  • Tobacco is a traveler,
    Come from the Indies hither;
    It passed sea and land
    Ere it came to my hand,
    And 'scaped the wind and weather.

    Tobacco's a musician.
    And in a pipe delighteth;
    It descends in a close,
    Through the organ of the nose,
    With a relish that inviteth.
    • Barten Holiday, Texnotamia (1630).
  • Some sigh for this and that;
    My wishes don't go far;
    The world may wag at will,
    So I have my cigar.
  • Neither do thou lust after that tawney weed tobacco.
  • Ods me I marle what pleasure or felicity they have in taking their roguish tobacco. It is good for nothing but to choke a man, and fill him full of smoke and embers.
    • Ben Jonson, Every Man in His Humour, Act III, scene 2.
  • And a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.
  • For Maggie has written a letter to give me my choice between
    The wee little whimpering Love and the great god Nick O'Teen.

    And I have been servant of Love for barely a twelvemonth clear,
    But I have been priest of Partagas a matter of seven year.

    And the gloom of my bachelor days is flecked with the cherry light
    Of stumps that I burned to friendship, and pleasure and work and fight.
  • Tobac! dont mon âme est ravie,
    Lorsque je te vois te perdre en l'air,
    Aussi promptement q'un éclair,
    Je vois l'image de ma vie.
    • Tobacco, charmer of my mind,
      When like the meteor's transient gleam,
      Thy substance gone to air I find,
      I think, alas! my life's the same.
    • Misson, Memoirs of his travels over England (1697). Translation by Ozell.
  • I would I were a cigarette
    Between my Lady's lithe sad lips,
    Where Death like Love, divinely set.
    With exquisite sighs and sips,
    Feeds and is fed.
    * * * *
    For life is Love and Love is death,
    It was my hap, a well-a-day!
    To burn my little hour away.
    • H. A. Page, Vers de Société, Madonna Mia.
  • Old man, God bless you, does your pipe taste sweetly?
    A beauty, by my soul!
    A ruddy flower-pot, rimmed with gold so neatly,
    What ask you for the bowl?
    O sir, that bowl for worlds I would not part with;
    A brave man gave it me,
    Who won it—now what think you—of a bashaw?
    At Belgrade's victory.
    • Gottfried Konrad Pfeffel, The Tobacco Pipe.
  • Tobacco's but an Indian weed,
    Grows green at morn, cut down at eve;
    It shows our decay, we are but clay.
    Think on this when you smoak Tobacco.
    • As quoted by Walter Scott, Rob Roy. First printed in Wit and Mirth, or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Volume I, p. 315. (Ed. 1707).
  • Yes, social friend, I love thee well,
    In learned doctors' spite;
    Thy clouds all other clouds dispel
    And lap me in delight.
  • It is not for nothing that this "ignoble tabagie," as Michelet calls it, spreads over all the world. Michelet rails against it because it renders you happily apart from thought or work;… Whatever keeps a man in the front garden, whatever checks wandering fancy and all inordinate ambition, whatever makes for lounging and contentment, makes just so surely for domestic happiness.
  • Am I not—a smoker and a brother?
    • A Veteran of Smokedom, The Smoker's Guide, Chapter IV. Last line.
  • Look at me—follow me—smell me! The "stunning" cigar I am smoking is one of a sample intended for the Captain General of Cuba, and the King of Spain, and positively cost a shilling! Oh! * * * I have some dearer at home. Yes, the expense is frightful, but——it! who can smoke the monstrous rubbish of the shops?
    • A Veteran of Smokedom, The Smoker's Guide, Chapter IV.
  • To smoke a cigar through a mouthpiece is equivalent to kissing a lady through a respirator.
    • A Veteran of Smokedom, The Smoker's Guide, Chapter V.
  • The cigarettes Mr. Slump smoked were prepared by doctors, so the advertisements declared, with the sole purpose of protecting his respiratory system. Yet Mr. Slump suffered and the young secretary suffered with him, hideously. For the first hours of every day he was possessed by a cough which arose from tartarean depths and was relieved only by whisky.
  • Dick Stoype
    Was a dear friend and lover of the pipe.
    He used to say one pipe of Wishart's best
    Gave life a zest.
    To him 'twas meat and drink and physic,
    To see the friendly vapor
    Curl round his midnight taper,
    And the black fume
    Clothe all the room,
    In clouds as dark as sciences metaphysic.
    • Charles Westmacott, Points of Misery.
  • A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can you want?
  • Lastly, the ashes left behind,
    May daily show to move the mind,
    That to ashes and dust return we must:
    Then think, and drink tobacco.
    • G. W. Probably George Withers, in Manuscript of 17th. Cent. owned by J. Payne Collier. Printed in My Little Book of Songs and Ballads from Ancient Musick Books Manuscript (1851). "Drink tobacco" means drinking in, or smoking.

See also

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