Daily Inspiration Quote by Bernard Levin

The sly trick here is the word “naturally,” a little rhetorical elbow to the ribs. Levin isn’t merely pointing at a public-health statistic; he’s diagnosing a cultural habit of pretending complexity excuses inaction. If a single product is tied to “an impressive one-third of cancers,” then the moral math should be easy. Yet the sentence is shaped to anticipate the evasions we’ve all heard: personal choice, pleasure, tradition, taxes, jobs. “Naturally” implies that only someone willfully obtuse would start anywhere else.

Calling the share “impressive” is Levin’s journalist’s irony: a compliment-word repurposed to shame. Tobacco’s achievement is monstrous, and the adjective turns that monstrosity into a kind of perverse performance review. It’s a subtle way of mocking societies that treat preventable harm as background noise while demanding heroic solutions for problems that are already politically convenient to ignore.

The line also reflects its late-20th-century context, when the epidemiology was settled but the politics were still muddy: governments addicted to tobacco revenue, industries perfecting denial, and a public slowly learning that “risk” had been marketed as style. Levin’s intent is to pin prevention to first principles. If you’re serious about cancer prevention, you don’t begin with inspirational slogans or futuristic cures. You begin with the thing that kills at scale and sells itself as normal. That’s the subtext: the real obstacle isn’t ignorance, it’s the refusal to follow obvious evidence to uncomfortable policy.