Top 100 Eric Schlosser Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Fast food is popular because it’s convenient, it’s cheap, and it tastes good. But the real cost of eating fast food never appears on the menu.”

— Eric Schlosser

2. “Marijuana gives rise to insanity – not in its users but in the policies directed against it. A nation that sentences the possessor of a single joint to life imprisonment without parole but sets a murderer free after perhaps six years is in the grips of a deep psychosis.”

— Eric Schlosser

3. “Every step appears as the unavoidable consequence of the preceding one,” Einstein said. “In the end, there beckons more and more clearly general annihilation.”

— Eric Schlosser

4. “Fast food chains spend a large amount of marketing to get the attention of children. People form their eating habits as children so they try to nurture clients as youngsters.”

— Eric Schlosser

5. “Different people, in good faith, can look at the same fact and interpret it differently. But thats where an interesting conversation begins.”

— Eric Schlosser

6. “During my school visits, I really enjoy the feedback I get from them much more than anything I might tell say to them.”

— Eric Schlosser

7. “As a matter of fact, most cases of food poisoning are never linked back to their source.”

— Eric Schlosser

8. “The fallibility of human beings guarantees that no technological system will ever be infallible.”

— Eric Schlosser

9. “Indeed, market research has found that children often recognize a brand logo before they can recognize their own name.”

— Eric Schlosser

10. “In the early days of the project, Teller was concerned that the intense heat of a nuclear explosion would set fire to the atmosphere and kill every living thing on earth. A.”

— Eric Schlosser

11. “Americans now spend more money on fast food than on higher education, personal computers, computer software, or new cars. They spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and recorded music – combined.”

— Eric Schlosser

12. “Twenty years ago, teenage boys in the United States drank twice as much milk as soda; now they drink twice as much soda as milk.”

— Eric Schlosser

13. “Kids have no idea when they’re drinking soda what they’re really drinking, and a lot of them are stunned when they learn that drinking a Big Gulp is like taking a big jar of sugar and just pouring it down. There are 50 teaspoons of sugar in a 64-ounce Big Gulp.”

— Eric Schlosser

14. “What we eat has changed more in the last 40 years than in the previous 40,000. The survival of the current food system depends upon widespread ignorance of how it really operates.”

— Eric Schlosser

15. “Fast food is inexpensive, convenient, and it tastes good. I’m all in favor of that. My problem is how heavily processed it is – how full of salt, fat, and sugar it is.”

— Eric Schlosser

16. “Thomas K. Jones, an undersecretary of defense, played down the number of casualties that a nuclear war might cause, arguing that families would survive if they dug a hole, covered it with a couple of doors, and put three feet of dirt on top. “It’s the dirt that does it,” Jones explained. “Everyone’s going to make it if there are enough shovels to go around.”

— Eric Schlosser

17. “The Golden Arches are now more widely recognized than the Christian cross.”

— Eric Schlosser

18. “The market is a tool, and a useful one. But the worship of this tool is a hollow faith. Far more important than any tool is what you make with it.”

— Eric Schlosser

19. “About 75 percent of the cattle in the United States were routinely fed livestock wastes – the rendered remains of dead sheep and dead cattle – until August of 1997. They were also fed millions of dead cats and dead dogs every year, purchased from animal shelters.”

— Eric Schlosser

20. “And workers who needed to go to the bathroom weren’t allowed to take a break. They were forced to pee right on the slaughterhouse floor, near meat that people would soon be eating.”

— Eric Schlosser

21. “I hate the word “inevitable” because I feel like things don’t have to be the way they are.”

— Eric Schlosser

22. “Congress should ban advertising that preys upon children, it should stop subsidizing dead-end jobs, it should pass tougher food safety laws, it should protect American workers from serious harm, it should fight against dangerous concentrations of economic power.”

— Eric Schlosser

23. “McDonald’s has been extraordinary at site selection; it was a pioneer in studying the best places for retail locations. One of the things it did is study very carefully where sprawl was headed.”

— Eric Schlosser

24. “A public outcry usually masks a private obsession.”

— Eric Schlosser

25. “The executives who run the fast food industry are not bad men. They are businessmen. They will sell free-range, organic, grass-fed hamburgers if you demand it. They will sell whatever sells at a profit.”

— Eric Schlosser

26. “Years ago when I got stuck, I’d start twirling my hair. That’s not possible anymore. I can’t prove the relationship between writing and hair loss, but I think I pulled out a fair amount trying to work on certain sentences.”

— Eric Schlosser

27. “The obesity epidemic among American children is becoming so bad that I think there’s a growing realization across the country that we’ve got to change what we’re feeding our kids and that school may be a really good place to start.”

— Eric Schlosser

28. “The history of the twentieth century was dominated by the struggle against totalitarian systems of state power. The twenty-first will no doubt be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power.”

— Eric Schlosser

29. “Whatever replaces the fast food industry should be regional, diverse, authentic, unpredictable, sustainable, profitable – and humble. It should know its limits.”

— Eric Schlosser

30. “The current fast food that we have is inexpensive when you buy it, but the long-term costs of eating it and the long-term costs to society, are much too high. This cheap food, when you add up all the total costs, is much too expensive.”

— Eric Schlosser

31. “The fast-food industry is in very good company with the lead industry and the tobacco industry in how it tries to mislead the public, and how aggressively it goes after anybody who criticizes its business practices.”

— Eric Schlosser

32. “The United States now has more prison inmates than full-time farmers.”

— Eric Schlosser

33. “On any given day in the United States about one-quarter of the adult population visits a fast food restaurant.”

— Eric Schlosser

34. “I think two different people can read one of my books and come away with completely different opinions on the subject. I hope they just read from the beginning to the end and be made to think about the subject. Then they can come to their own conclusions.”

— Eric Schlosser

35. “Sergeant Paul Ramoneda, a twenty-eight-year-old baker with the Ninth Food Service Squadron, was one of the first to reach the bomber.”

— Eric Schlosser

36. “The war on foodborne pathogens deserves the sort of national attention and resources that has been devoted to the war on drugs. Far more Americans are severely harmed every year by food poisoning than by illegal drug use. And the harms caused by food poisoning are usually inadvertent and unanticipated. People who smoke crack know the potential dangers; most people who eat hamburgers don’t. Eating in the United States should no longer be a form of high-risk behavior.”

— Eric Schlosser

37. “Right now thousands of missiles are hidden away, literally out of sight, topped with warheads and ready to go, awaiting the right electrical signal. They are a collective death wish, barely suppressed. Every one of them is an accident waiting to happen, a potential act of mass murder. They are out there, waiting, soulless and mechanical, sustained by our denial – and they work.”

— Eric Schlosser

38. “A generation ago, three-quarters of the money used to buy food in the United States was spent to prepare meals at home. Today about half of the money used to buy food is spent at restaurants – mainly at fast food restaurants.”

— Eric Schlosser

39. “The suicide rate among ranchers and farmers in the United States is now about three times higher than the national average.”

— Eric Schlosser

40. “We’re all connected by the system, and we all have to be a part, I think, of changing it.”

— Eric Schlosser

41. “The typical American now consumes approximately three hamburgers and four orders of french fries every week.”

— Eric Schlosser

42. “The usefulness of the market, its effectiveness as a tool, cuts both ways. The real power of the American consumer has not yet been unleashed. The heads of Burger King, KFC, and McDonald’s should feel daunted; they’re outnumbered. There are three of them and almost three hundred million of you.”

— Eric Schlosser

43. “Yes, a cheeseburger and fries is probably my favourite meal. But I don’t eat ground beef anymore.”

— Eric Schlosser

44. “The management no longer depends upon the talents or skills of its workers – those things are built into the operating systems and machines. Jobs that have been “deskilled” can be filled cheaply. The need to retain any individual worker is greatly reduced by the ease with which he or she can be replaced.”

— Eric Schlosser

45. “There’s been a growing effort to kick soda out of the schools. And governors as different as Arnold Schwarzenegger in California and Mike Huckabee in Arkansas have worked hard to get soda and junk food out of their state schools, which is good.”

— Eric Schlosser

46. “I’d been eating fast food all my life without thinking about it. And the more I learned about the subject, the more intrigued I became.”

— Eric Schlosser

47. “The smallest attack option would hit the Soviet Union with almost two thousand weapons; the largest with more than three thousand. The vast scale and inflexibility of the SIOP led Kissinger to describe it as a “horror strategy.”

— Eric Schlosser

48. “The impact of McDonald’s on the way we live today is hard to overstate. The Golden Arches are now more widely recognized than the Christian cross.”

— Eric Schlosser

49. “I find that one of the most important things, as a writer, is to just show up – to just stay in the chair and fight through the difficult patches. As long as you’re at the desk, and you’re willing to fight it out, eventually the right words will come.”

— Eric Schlosser

50. “Point of view is present in anything I write, but I really try to let the subject and facts speak for themselves.”

— Eric Schlosser