Quotes & Sayings About Tobacco Industry

Part of the success of the tobacco industry in purveying this brew of addictive poisons can be attributed to widespread unfamiliarity with baloney detection, critical thinking, and the scientific method. Gullibility kills. — Carl Sagan

But Big Oil and Big Coal have always been as skilled at propaganda as they are at mining and drilling. Like the tobacco industry before them, their success depends on keeping Americans stupid. — Jeff Goodell

Tobacco is the only industry that produces products to make huge profits and at the same time damage the health and kill their consumers. — Margaret Chan

All told, in the United States, the sex industry grosses more than the domestic revenue of the tobacco and alcohol industries put together. All told, the American male spends more money annually per capita on the sex industry than on taking his wife to the movies and buying video games for his children. All told, the American male is clearly not getting what he wants at home. — Nic Kelman

Just as tobacco companies have been obliged to pay the costs of helping people to quit smoking, and BP has had to pay for much of the cleanup of its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it is high time for the industry to at least split the bill for the climate crisis. — Naomi Klein

Oh, I know: If you're fat, let's not blame you, let's sue McDonalds! Oh, for cryin' out loud, hey, if you smoke, not your fault, it's the tobacco company's fault! Hey, if you shoot somebody, not your fault, let's blame the gun industry! — Brad Stine

The true face of smoking is disease, death and horror - not the glamour and sophistication the pushers in the tobacco industry try to portray. — David Byrne

The history of the tobacco industry is not a positive one. — Susan Cameron

As scientists linked smoking to cancer, the tobacco industry was under particularly pointed attack, which might have heightened Powell's alarmism. As a director at Philip Morris from 1964 until he joined the Supreme Court, Powell was an unabashed defender of tobacco, signing off on a series of annual reports lashing out at critics. The company's 1967 annual report, for instance, declared, "We deplore the lack of objectivity in so important a controversy ... Unfortunately the positive benefits of smoking which are so widely acknowledged are largely ignored by many reports linking cigarettes and health, and little attention is paid to the scientific reports which are favorable to smoking." Powell took umbrage at the refusal by the Federal Communications Commission to grant the tobacco companies "equal time" to respond to their critics on television and argued that the companies' First Amendment rights were being infringed. — Jane Mayer

Yet the personal choice to smoke is ... the same kind of choice as the driver who downed the beers, and then the telephone pole. - Open letter from the tobacco industry, 1988 — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Asking the public health community to investigate the role of vaccines in the development of autism is like asking the tobacco industry to investigate the link between lung cancer and smoking. — Rick Rollens

If they gave a Nobel Peace Prize for work against big tobacco, not just in the industry, but also with the California tax initiative, Rob Reiner really deserves one. — Joe Eszterhas

worse than any pressure exerted by the tobacco industry. — T. Colin Campbell

If our company is to survive and prosper, over the long term we must get our share of the youth market. — R. J. Reynolds

The fast-food industry is in very good company with the lead industry and the tobacco industry in how it tries to mislead the public, and how aggressively it goes after anybody who criticizes its business practices. — Eric Schlosser

I never wanted Ford to be a place, like the tobacco industry, where our employees were not proud of coming to work for us. I felt there was a danger of that, should we be marginalized as a major polluter. — William Clay Ford Jr.

Sugar is the next tobacco, without a doubt, and that industry should be scared. It should be taxed just like tobacco and anything else that can, frankly, destroy lives, — Jamie Oliver

The result, as the journalist Elizabeth Drew noted in the Atlantic Monthly, was "an unabashed act to protect private industry from government regulation." Politicians were far more protective of the narrow interests of tobacco than of the broad interest of public health. Tobacco makers need not have bothered inventing protective filters, Drew wrote drily: Congress had turned out to be "the best filter yet. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

The United States government continues to pour billions of dollars into research on cancer, while it also subsidizes the tobacco industry. Much of the research money goes toward animal experiments, many of them only remotely connected with fighting cancer - experimenters have been known to relabel their work "cancer research" when they found they could get more money for it that way than under some other label. — Peter Singer

The ACS raised over $180 million last year through its network of 58 Divisions and 3,000 local Chapters. The Society's major public campaign is aimed at reducing smoking and cancers related to it. Yet ... the ACS has but a single (lobbyist) in Washington DC. The industry-supported Tobacco Institute, on the other hand, has a ten million dollar budget which supports dozens of Washington staff. — Michael F. Jacobson

In its 2013 annual report on "Global Risks," the World Economic Forum (host of the annual superelite gathering in Davos), stated plainly, "Although the Alaskan village of Kivalina - which faces being 'wiped out' by the changing climate - was unsuccessful in its attempts to file a US$ 400 million lawsuit against oil and coal companies, future plaintiffs may be more successful. Five decades ago, the U.S. tobacco industry would not have suspected that in 1997 it would agree to pay $368 billion in health-related damages. — Naomi Klein

The economic hardship of my family and of many others, a century ago, was caused by a monopoly, the American Tobacco Company, which had eliminated all competitors and thus was able to reduce as it pleased the prices it paid to farmers. The American Tobacco Company was the work of James B. Duke of Durham, North Carolina, and New York City, who, disregarding any other consideration, followed a capitalist logic to absolute control of his industry and, incidentally, of the economic fate of thousands of families such as my own. — Wendell Berry

It is more profitable for your congressman to support the tobacco industry than your life. — Jackie Mason

So much for the crusade against drugs ... all America is actually doing is consolidating its position as the biggest dealer in addictive and lethal substances on the planet, waging war on all rivals, whether they take the form of the Thai domestic tobacco industry or the Colombian cocaine cartels. — Alexander Cockburn

This remains a very important opportunity for the American people to have their day in court against big tobacco and its marketing practices. I urge Congress to provide the funding to allow the lawsuit to move forward, and not to shield the tobacco industry from the consequences of its actions. — William J. Clinton