You can’t be patriotic on a salary that just keeps the wolf from the door. <small>p. 56</small> - George W. Plunkitt

As a matter of policy, if nothing else, why should the Tammany leaders go into such dirty business, when there is so much honest graft lyin’ around when they are in power? <small>p. 6</small>

Once let a man grow up amidst Brooklyn’s cobblestones, with the odor of Newton Creek and Gowanus Canal ever in his nostrils, and there’s no place in the world for him except Brooklyn. <small>p. 41</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>