Leadership Quote by John McCarthy

McCarthy’s line works because it hijacks a familiar public-health frame and turns it into a moral indictment. Smoking is the kind of killer we can count: bodies, statistics, warning labels, settlement money. “Self-righteousness,” by contrast, is the socially approved vice, the one that often travels disguised as virtue. By pairing them, he’s arguing that the deadliest threats in politics aren’t always the ones we can measure; they’re the ones we sanctify.

The intent is less epidemiology than provocation. He’s not literally claiming a death toll; he’s weaponizing exaggeration to expose a pattern: once people believe they occupy the moral high ground, cruelty becomes policy, and dissent becomes heresy. The subtext is that moral certainty lubricates harm. It permits “necessary” collateral damage, justifies censorship, authorizes war, hardens the criminal-justice impulse, and turns neighbors into enemies with clean consciences. A cigarette rarely convinces you your victim deserves it. Self-righteousness does that all day.

As a politician, McCarthy is also slipping a critique of his own ecosystem into a sound bite that can survive the news cycle. It’s a rebuke of performative purity and grievance politics, where outrage functions like a stimulant and shame is a governing tool. The rhetorical trick is the inversion: society treats smoking as a shameful personal habit and moralism as a civic asset. He flips the stigma, suggesting the more “upright” we feel, the less we notice the violence done in our name.

It lands because it’s uncomfortable: most people can imagine quitting smoking. Fewer can imagine quitting righteousness.