abstract: Quasi-Einstein metrics, recently introduced by J. Case, Y. S. Shu and G. Wei, are a natural generalization of Einstein metric and their importance is mainly due to their relation with Einstein warped products and also with gradient Ricci solitons. We prove a number of triviality results for Einstein warped products and quasi-Einstein manifolds using different techniques and under assumptions of various nature. These extend previous works by D. S.Kim and Y. H. Kim and J. Case. The proofs rely on the maximum principle at infinity, a new gradient estimate for solutions of weighted Poisson-type equations and some Liouville type theorems in the setting of weighted manifolds.