You can use the @ReadOnly annotation to increase the limit of queries. This is documented here - http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/apexcode/Content/apex_classes_annotation_ReadOnly.htm. The down side of this is you can't carry out any DML operations and it must be used to annotate a Web Service or Schedulable implementation.
You can also use database.query(query) which creates the query at run time (http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/apexcode/Content/apex_System_Database_query.htm) like this (untested) :
AggregateResult results = database.query('SELECT COUNT(id) count FROM sObject');
Integer count = results.get('result');