In every area of life throughout Britain we’ve lived with a highly conspicuous creature, a being that is sociable with well-defined habits and quite simple needs. Timeshift: The Smoking Years, BBC 2012
American industrialist James Albert Bonsack invented the first cigarette rolling machine. The date was 1880. Smoking would never be the same again. ibid.
Women started to challenge conventions. ibid.
Bernays’ research suggested that the cigarette was a symbol of male power and of the penis. ibid.
Over 80% of British troops returned home from the war as smokers. ibid.
Lennox Johnson who was conducting his own research into smoking – as early as the 1920s he was speculating on the likely long-term health effects smokers were exposing themselves to. ibid.
He had also devised a nicotine replacement therapy. ibid.
Within two years of starting their research Doll & Hill discovered there was a clear link between smoking and lung cancer. ibid.
Smokers displayed a remarkable reluctance to accept the science. ibid.
The tobacco lobby quickly found ways to counter the findings. ibid.
Cigarettes were also seen as essential fashion accessories. ibid.
More than half the British population smoked. ibid.
The smoker today is a diminished, anguished, exhausted creature. ibid.
Maggie Philbin: We all know smoking’s bad for you. But it’s not as bad as stabbing yourself in the neck with a safari knife. But why? Well, it’s all to do with molecules. Spitting Image s2e4, parody of Tomorrow's World, ITV 1985
The pipe with solemn interposing puff,
Makes half a sentence at a time enough;
The dozing sages drop the drowsy strain,
The pause and puff – and speak, and pause again. William Cowper, Conversation, 1782
His mother, Queen Victoria, had banned the smoking of cigars in her presence, and, by extension, anywhere in high society. Her son, the Prince of Wales, broke this ban. On the day he assumed the throne as Edward VII, he uttered these words in court: ‘Gentlemen, you may smoke.’ His royal preference was the double Corona, and his personal band (long sought by collectors) is decorated with three white plumes. Sartoriana Antiquitus
To single out smoking as a causal agent is on the evidence to date completely unjustified. Sir Alex Maxwell, tobacco executive
Thunderbirds: there was smoking in almost all of the episodes. Lady Penelope always smokes a cigarette. Professor Kate Hunt
Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times. Mark Twain, attributions & variations
Perception modifies reality: when I abandoned the smoking habit of more than three decades I was given a supposedly helpful pill called Wellbutrin. But as soon as I discovered that this was the brand name for an antidepressant, I tossed the bottle away. There may be successful methods for overcoming the blues but for me they cannot include a capsule that says: ‘Fool yourself into happiness, while pretending not to do so.’ I should actually want my mind to be strong enough to circumvent such a trick. Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
Well, I’m not here to impinge on anybody else’s lifestyle. If I’m in a place where I know I’m going to harm somebody’s health or somebody asks me to please not smoke, I just go outside and smoke. But I do resent the way the nonsmoking mentality has been imposed on the smoking minority. Because, first of all, in a democracy, minorities do have rights. And, second, the whole pitch about smoking has gone from being a health issue to a moral issue, and when they reduce something to a moral issue, it has no place in any kind of legislation, as far as I’m concerned. Frank Zappa
There was a young lady named Mae
Who smoked without stopping all day;
As pack followed pack,
Her lungs first turned black,
And eventually rotted away. Edward Gorey, Floating Worlds
Smoking I find the most ridiculous of all the varieties of human behaviour and practically the only one that is entirely against nature. Can you imagine a cow or any animal taking a mouthful of smouldering straw then breathing in the smoke and blowing it out through its nostrils? Ian Fleming, Goldfinger
After some time he felt for his pipe. It was not broken, and that was something. Then he felt for his pouch, and there was some tobacco in it, and that was something more. Then he felt for matches and he could not find any at all, and that shattered his hopes completely. J R R Tolkien, The Hobbit
Personally, if I were trying to discourage people from smoking, my sign would be a little different. In fact, I might even go too far in the opposite direction. My sign would say something like, ‘Smoke if you wish. But if you do, be prepared for the following series of events: First, we will confiscate your cigarette and extinguish it somewhere on the surface of your skin. We will then run your nicotine-stained fingers through a paper shredder and throw them into the street, where wild dogs will swallow them and then regurgitate them into the sewers, so that infected rats can further soil them before they’re flushed out to sea with the rest of the city’s filth. After such time, we will systematically seek out your friends and loved one and destroy their lives.’
Wouldn’t you like to see a sign like that? George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?
Cancer seems a high price to pay for an innocuous-looking habit. You get into smoking and you are robbed of the last 25 years of your life. Some cocky souls will say, ‘Ah yes, but they are the worst 25 years.’ Nobody feels like that in a cancer ward. There are no cocky souls in a cancer ward. But there’s a lot of pain, not just of the excruciating physical kind that they shoot you full of morphine to smother. There are a lot of tears. All round. It is hard to say goodbye to the people you love. And it’s scary. Cancer wards have a way of knocking the cockiness out of you. And for what? Another cigarette? Tony Parsons
Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss. Sigmund Freud
Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics. Fletcher Knebel
The best way to stop smoking is to just stop – no ifs, and or butts. Edith Zittler
There’s to be a total ban on smoking in all public places in England. BBC News
Smoke so does get in one’s eyes. Murder Ahoy! 1964 starring Margaret Rutherford & Lionel Jeffries & Charles Tingwell & William Mervyn & Joan Benham & Nicholas Parsons & Stringer Davis & Miles Malleson & Henry Oscar & Derek Nimmo & Gerald Cross & Bernard Adams & Edna Petrie et al, director George Pollock
‘I had a dog. He smoked. He's dead.’ David Walliams’ Awfully Good Ads, American Cancer Society, Channel 4 2011
When I was in England I experimented with marijuana a time or two – and didn’t like it – and didn't inhale and never tried inhaling again. Bill Clinton, television interview 1992
‘I think they have a great potential to save millions of lives in the next twenty-thirty years.’ Horizon, E-Cigarettes, Miracles or Menace? expert, BBC 2016
cf.
‘We really don’t know what the long-term effects will be.’ ibid. expert
The big tobacco companies are now major players in the business of making e-cigarettes. ibid.
Bernays set out to experiment with the minds of the popular classes. His most dramatic experiment was to persuade women to smoke. At that time there was a taboo against women smoking. And one of his early clients, George Hill, the president of the American tobacco corporation, asked Bernays to find a way of breaking it. Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self I: Happiness Machines, BBC 2002
What Bernays had created was the idea that if a woman smoked, it made her more powerful and independent. An idea that still persists today. It made him [Bernays] realise that it was possible to persuade people to behave irrationally if you linked products to their emotional desires and feelings. The idea that smoking actually made women freer was completely irrational but it made them feel more independent. ibid.
In every area of life throughout Britain we’ve lived with a highly conspicuous creature, a being that is sociable with well-defined habits and quite simple needs. Timeshift: The Smoking Years, BBC 2012
American industrialist James Albert Bonsack invented the first cigarette rolling machine. The date was 1880. Smoking would never be the same again. ibid.
Women started to challenge conventions. ibid.
Bernays’ research suggested that the cigarette was a symbol of male power and of the penis. ibid.
Over 80% of British troops returned home from the war as smokers. ibid.