Smoking ... is downright dangerous. Most people who smoke will eventually contract a fatal disease and die. But they don't brag ab...out it, do they? Most people who ski, play professional football or drive race cars, will not die--at least not in the act--and yet they are the ones with the glamorous images, the expensive equipment and the mythic proportions. Why this should be I cannot say, unless it is simply that the average American does not know a daredevil when he sees one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Reverend Samuel Peters ... exaggerated the Blue Laws, but they did include "Capital Lawes" providing a death penalty for any c...hild over sixteen who was found guilty of cursing or striking his natural parents; a death penalty for an incorrigible son; a law forbidding smoking except in a room in a private house; another law declaring smoking illegal except on a journey five miles away from home,...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men, my dear, are very queer animals, a mixture of horse- nervousness, ass-stubbornness, and camel-malice--with an angel bobbing a...bout unexpectedly like the apple in the posset, and when they can do exactly as they please, they are very hard to drive. Oh, England. Sick in head and sick in heart, Sick in whole and every part, And yet sicker thou art still For thinking that thou art not ill.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are all such accidents. We do not make up history and culture. We simply appear, not by our own choice. We make what we can of ...our condition with the means available. We must accept the mixture as we find it--the impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The knocking out of a pipe can be made almost as important as the smoking of it, especially if there are nervous people in the roo...m. A good, smart knock of a pipe against a tin wastebasket and you will have a neurasthenic out of his chair and into the window sash in no time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What a cunning mixture of sentiment, pity, tenderness, irony surrounds adolescence, what knowing watchfulness! Young birds on thei...r first flight are hardly so hovered around.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Germans are the most philosophic people in the world, and the greatest smokers: now I trace their philosophy to their smoking....... Smoking has a sedative effect upon the nerves, and enables a man to bear the sorrows of this life (of which every one has his share) not only decently, but dignifiedly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If the devil were to offer me a resurgence of what is commonly called virility, I'd decline. "Just keep my liver and lungs in good... working order," I'd reply, "so I can go on drinking and smoking!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I see not much difference between ourselves & the Turks, save that we have foreskins and they none, that they have long dresses an...d we short, and that we talk much and they little. In England the vices in fashion are whoring & drinking, in Turkey, sodomy and smoking.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I was always able to understand my friend who decided to quit smoking and who, through an effort of will, succeeded in doing so. O...ne morning, he opened the newspaper, read that the first H- bomb had exploded, found out about the bomb's admirable effects and went straight to the tobacconist's.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »