Looking for a way to encourage your employees to quit smoking? Aside logical reasoning like saving money and improving health, emotional calls from slogans or quotes could create the spark that ignites a change.

What will it take to end smoking?

And despite promises to stop production if smoking was proven to cause harm, tobacco companies continue to produce and market their health destroying products. Until there is a ban on tobacco products, social campaigns are the best way to educate people into the dangers of smoking. Here are the most impactful slogans and quotes we could curate on the subject organized by category.

Anti-Smoking Slogans

The campaigns against smoking have been progressing for decades and made a positive impact to help educate people of the dangers of smoking. Here are our favorite slogans in the ongoing cultural battle against smoking.

  • A smoker dies of lung cancer every day!
  • Be Cool – Don’t Be a Smoking Fool.
  • Be Cool, Don’t be a Fool.
  • Be important, don’t be impotent.
  • Be smart. Don’t start.
  • Breathe healthily, live happily.
  • Breathe healthily, live happily.
  • Choose a life without smoking.
  • Don’t be a Butthead.
  • Don’t burn your life with cigarettes.
  • Don’t let your future go up in smoke.
  • Don’t pout, put it out.
  • Don’t puff your life away.
  • Don’t smoke – there are cooler ways to die.
  • Don’t smoke you will choke!
  • Don’t smoke, it’s not a joke.
  • Everyone has a right to clean air.
  • Hang tough, don’t puff.
  • Save your lungs, save your life.
  • Say no to smoking.
  • Smart folks don’t use smokes.
  • Smoke and choke.
  • Smoke can cause a slow and painful death.
  • Smoke. Stink. Die.
  • Smoking is like paying someone to kill you. They’re rich; you’re dead.
  • Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics.
  • Smoking makes you ugly.
  • Smoking…a Grave Mistake.
  • The cigarette does the smoking – you’re just the sucker.
  • Your health is in your hands.

Stop Smoking Slogans


Quitting is one of the hardest things to do since tobacco addiction is rated to be harder than heroin. If you are starting a quit-smoking campaign, here are some slogans to help encourage folks to end this deadly routine.

  • Be A Fighter; Put Down The Lighter.
  • Cancer cures smoking.
  • Cigarettes are killers that travel in packs.
  • Cigarettes burn holes in your pocket.
  • I quit because my kids love me.
  • If you can’t stop smoking, cancer will.
  • Kick it before it kills you.
  • Kill the cigarettes or they kill you.
  • Kill the cigarettes or they kill you.
  • Kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray.
  • Listen to your lungs, they are crying.
  • Put it out before it puts you out.
  • Quit and stay healthy.
  • Quit smoking before smoking quits you.
  • Quit smoking or die trying.
  • Quit smoking. It kills!
  • Say yes to your life by quitting.
  • Smokers don’t grow old… they die young.
  • Smoking causes a painful and slow death.
  • Smoking causes lung cancer.

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  • Smoking is colorful, Black lungs, Yellow teeth.
  • Smoking kills people faster than they think.
  • Smoking kills slowly.
  • Smoking? You must be joking.
  • Stay healthy and stop smoking.
  • Stop smoking now.
  • Stop smoking. Start living.
  • Tar the roads, not your lungs.
  • The army of smokers lost the war.
  • The future of smoking is death.
  • Tobacco or Health: Choose Health.
  • Trash the Ash.
  • We can’t hang out because you smoke.
  • Who says being a quitter is a bad thing?
  • You can live without it.

Anti-Tobacco Slogans

Smoking literally kills.

The big tobacco companies may not be directly responsible for half a million deaths a year, but until tobacco is banned the product will continue to tempt our youth. Here are some slogans with the goal of preventing smoking.

  • A cigarette a day takes your life away.
  • A cigarette is a poison that kills you slowly.
  • A cigarette is your ticket to death.
  • Are you smoking tobacco, or is it smoking you?
  • Ban Tobacco Now!
  • Buying cigarettes..costs you your life.
  • Choose your family over a cigarette.
  • Cigarette and smoke make your life a joke.
  • Cigarette burns our lungs. Stop smoking.
  • Cigarette is a barrier where life stops.
  • Cigarette: A devil in the packet.
  • Don’t be a slave of tobacco.
  • Don’t let tobacco kill you.
  • Don’t let tobacco destroy you, start by destroying tobacco companies!
  • Escape from the tobacco addiction, ban the production of cigarettes
  • Every drag of a cigarette takes away 2 seconds from your life.
  • Have you ever counted the amount of money that you have spent on smoking?
  • If you are a smoker, that means you are paying some companies to kill you.
  • Lipstick looks better on lips than cigarette.
  • Make Tobacco Illegal, Fight for Life!
  • Share and enjoy clean new environment, say no to tobacco!
  • Smoking Will Be A Crime In Time
  • Stop wasting your wealth on buying death.
  • Take a pledge to make the world free of cigarettes.
  • The “Marlboro Man” died of lung cancer.
  • The cigarette that you smoke affects little lungs as well.
  • The Tobacco companies only love you for their profits.
  • The tobacco giants only care for cash.
  • Tobacco companies kill their best customers.
  • Tobacco Tax pays for your medical care when you die.
  • Tobacco-free families deserve to live without it!
  • Your life is a gift. Don’t waste it on cigarettes.

Anti-Smoking Quotes

Each one of these quotes can help kick the habit for good.

Here are some great quotes on anti-smoking you can also use in a campaign or inspire.

  • Action on Smoking and Health has decreed that exposing others to secondhand smoke in any circumstance, including in the home, should make all smokers liable to criminal prosecution for homicide with depraved indifference, punishable by death in areas of the United States. – John Banzhaf
  • After years of denial and deception, the Philip Morris company has admitted that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer and other diseases. This formal acknowledgment comes far too late but still we must all welcome it. It can be the beginning of clearing the air. – Bill Clinton
  • Am I self-righteous? Why not? It’s not like I can count on you to be righteous for me. – Henry Rollins
  • Anti-smoking has aroused a passion in some individuals which has lead to some very over-the-top remarks – as can be seen below. (To be fair, we have chosen the most dramatic here!)

Are you a public smoker that whines about the self-righteousness and ‘negativity’ of some people who refuse to suck on burning tubes of paper filled with chemical-soaked chopped up leaves? OK, so you painfully attack our lungs and nasal passages with your perverted public pollution and we’re supposed to be positive, pat you on the back, and tell you that everything is fine? Everything is not fine. You violate our bodies. You give us pain. You’re no better than a rapist. Until you come to your senses, you are the enemy. – Duane Alan Hahn

  • Cigars are no safe alternative act. – Rep. Edward J. Markey
  • Even those social smokers who only smoke sometimes, are addicted. They just need less of it, but they need it. And occasional smoking is even worse. – Abhishek Kumar
  • If I decided to act like a crazed monkey, flinging feces at everyone around me wherever I went, and a glob of it hit you in the face, you probably wouldn’t like it because it’s a health hazard and it stinks. Would it be OK for me to say to you, “If you don’t like it, go somewhere else! I have rights too!”? – Martin Yasay
  • If we lose the battle against tobacco, we will lose the war against cancer. – John Arradondo
  • Please do not throw cigarette butts on the ground, the ducks are getting cancer. – Chattanooga Lives green
  • Pleasure which must be enjoyed at the expense of another’s pain, can never be enjoyed by a worthy mind. Pleasure’s couch is virtue’s grave. – Augustine J. Duganne
  • Public smokers love to label those who don’t want to breathe in their smoke as whiners. The unnatural act of smoking somehow became the default condition over the years in the minds of millions, so we have ‘anti-smokers’ and ‘non-smokers’ as if smoking is normal. People are finally waking up and saying “Wait a minute, smokers are the perverted ones, not me! Not smoking is the default condition!” Smokers should be called ‘anti-fresh-air-icans’ or ‘anti-pulmonarians’ or ‘non-humanitarians’ or just plain old lung terrorists. The good news is that people’s minds are becoming less clouded, which means that smokers are losing their stranglehold on the public, so now smokers have become the whiners. – Duane Alan Hahn
  • Recent studies have found that nonsmoking women are more susceptible to DNA damage than nonsmoking men when exposed to an environmental carcinogen. Secondhand smoke is a known risk factor for lung cancer, which still kills more women and men than any other single cancer. – PARADE – page 16 – October 9, 2005
  • Secondhand smoke is an environmental trigger of asthma, the cause of an estimated ten million missed school days for children in the U.S. It is estimated that up to 1 million children have aggravated asthma symptoms caused by secondhand smoke. – Martha Casey
  • Smoking areas in restaurants are like peeing areas in swimming pools. – Unknown
  • Smoking helps you lose weight-one lung at a time! – Alfred E. Neuman

Smoking is a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless. – King James I of England

  • Some smokers and ex-smokers like to say that all people have vices that harm others and smoking is no different from other bad habits such as overeating. Well, I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have an overweight person standing next to me than a smoker or a drunk or a person who is high on drugs. Some vices have a more immediate detrimental effect on the wellbeing of others. Pointing fingers at other vices doesn’t change the fact that public smokers attack the lungs and nasal passages of innocent bystanders, giving at least some of them instant pain and discomfort. – Duane Alan Hahn
  • Take your life back from the tobacco companies. They don’t own you anymore. – John Hawkins
  • The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • The entire issue concerning sidestream smoke . . . has been minimized by the industry. If a group of terrorists decided to place a poison gas in public places there would be public outrage and prompt reaction. – William Farone (former Philip Morris scientist)

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  • The public health authorities never mention the main reason many American have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide. -Kurt Vonnegut
  • What “right to smoke?” Do I have a right to light up a sulfur candle in the middle of a crowd? Or set off a 4-Gone fogger? What would happen if I ran around with a can of Black Flag, spraying it in the faces of passersby at random? I’d be arrested for assault with a deadly weapon, and probably also brought up on terrorism charges, and I’d deserve it mightily. So why do people addicted to inhaling an insecticide (not only is it a common ingredient in organic bug sprays; that’s also its function in the tobacco plant) believe they have a right to spew noxious, toxic, carcinogenic fumes all over the place in public? – James H H Lampert
  • You know what? My father died at the age of 53, about 10 years ago, to smoking. And my grandfather died at 49. I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my entire life. So I find it really hard, and it’s a bitter pill for me to swallow, to sit and watch these guys smoke their lives away earlier than anticipated. I can’t understand how you can taste food, reflect it, smoke, go back and taste it. There has to be an inaccuracy beyond belief. – Chef Gordon Ramsay
  • You own yourself, so if you want to do something that destroys yourself, go ahead. Just don’t harm others when you do. – Jim Goebel

Stop Smoking Quotes

Stop smoking now.

Stopping smoking can be hard, and knowing there are others out there who have gone through the same thing can be a help. Here are some inspirational quotes from celebrities and artists on the hardships of giving up this habit.

  • All behavioral or mood disorders – including depression, OCD, ADHD and addiction – have some neurochemical components, but sufferers can still work to overcome them. – Jeffrey Kluger.
  • All the suffering, stress and addiction comes from not realizing you already are what you are looking for. – Jon Kabat-Zinn
  • At least three times every day take a moment and ask yourself what is really important. Have the wisdom and the courage to build your life around your answer. – Lee Jampolsky
  • Believe you can and you’re halfway there. – Theodore Roosevelt
  • Checking your ego, abandoning it, letting it go, is a huge part of recovery from addiction. – Susannah Grant
  • Get me well so I can get on television and tell people to stop smoking. – Nat King Cole
  • Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times – Mark Twain
  • I haven’t had a cigarette in 6 years… that’s because I’m scared of my wife. – Barrack Obama

If you are thinking of giving up smoking, I’d recommend it. The first week was the most difficult. You have to change your routine and habits completely, avoid situations where you’d usually smoke. It’s nice to have energy, it’s nice to have good skin, it’s nice to not cough up chunks of blackened lung tissue every morning, it’s nice to taste food properly, it’s nice to be able to run, it’s nice not to stink like an ashtray. – Nick Simpson

  • It is easier to stay out than get out. – Mark Twain
  • It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped. – Tony Robbins
  • It is way less foolish to throw your money away than it is to use it to buy and then consume things such as cigarettes. – Mokokoma Mokhonoana
  • It’s not the cigarette that kills you, it’s the thoughts behind the cigarette that does. – Raghu Venkatesh
  • Our strength grows out of our weakness. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily. – Zig Ziglar
  • Quitting is the only way you can stop smoking. – Abhishek Kumar
  • Smoking is neither an art nor a sport. Better to liberate yourself before the body retaliates, for its vengeance would be a furious blow enthused out of all the bygone years’ mercy you thanklessly thought you were entitled to. – Lukhman Pambra
  • Success is a product of focus. Focus comes from having a purpose. Having a purpose comes from being needed. Being needed comes from serving others. – P.F. Barry
  • Take care of the children. Tobacco will kill you, and I am living proof of it. – Wayne Mclaren, The Marlboro Man.
  • The secret of getting ahead is getting started. – Mark Twain
  • The surest way not to fail is to determine to succeed. – Richard Brinsley Sheridan
  • There is no such thing in anyone’s life as an unimportant day. – Alexander Woollcott
  • These things are killing me… Those damn cigarettes. -Johnny Carson

Watch your cigarette cravings in a curious, mindful way. Read CURIOSITY KILLED THE CRAVING. – Raj Fernandes

  • We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. – Aristotle
  • When you are staring at the face of such a formidable adversary as tobacco cigarette addiction, it can help significantly to have some powerful weapons in your arsenal. Knowledge is a remarkably powerful weapon against cigarette addiction. – Earl Chinnici
  • When you first start chanting or repeating your positive affirmations, they don’t make much sense. You don’t feel great about them because they strongly oppose your current reality. That’s the point. The affirmations should oppose your current reality. That’s how change happens. Everyone feels strange about using affirmations to begin with. But if you stick to the program, the power of positive affirmations will take effect. – Gudjon Bergmann
  • You are greater than your addiction. – Nasia Davos

Smoking is one of the top causes of deaths in the United States accounting for more than 480,000 deaths a year. What’s worse is smokers are responsible for the deaths of around 41,000 “passive” smokers a year, who are regularly exposed to secondhand smoke. This is beyond tragic.

Around 13.7% of all American adults smoke and while the number of addicts are slowly dropping thanks in part to anti-smoking campaigns, it’s not happening fast enough with more than 300 new smokers picking up the habit every day according to the CDC.

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