George W. Plunkitt Quotes

Say, I don’t wish I was a poet, for if I was, I guess I’d be livin’ in a garret on no dollars a week instead of runnin’ a great contractin’ and transportation business which is doin’ pretty well, thank you; but, honest, now, the notion takes me sometimes to yell poetry of the red-hot-hail-glorious-land kind when I think of New York City as a state by itself. <small>p. 67</small>

Big Tim made money out of liquor—sellin’ it to other people. That’s the only way to get good out of liquor. <small>p. 79</small>

Then will return the good old times, when our district leaders could have nice comfortable primary elections at some place selected by themselves and let in only men that they approved of as good Democrats. <small>p. 83</small>

Putin’ on style don’t pay in politics. <small>p. 50</small>

Politics is as much a regular business as the grocery or the dry-goods or the drug business. You've got to be trained up to it or you're sure to fail. <small>p. 19</small>

The Wall Street banker thinks it shameful to raise a department clerk’s salary from $1500 to $1800 a year, but every man who draws a salary himself says: “That’s all right. I wish it was me.” And he feels very much like votin’ the Tammany ticket on election day, just out of sympathy. <small>p. 6</small>

This civil service law is the biggest fraud of the age. It is the curse of the nation. <small>p. 11</small>