David Galula Quotes

All the anxious politicians of his party have been looking upon him as certainty, at no distant day, to be the President of the United States. They have seen in his round, jolly, fruitful face, post offices land offices, marshalships, and cabinet appointments, chargeships and foreign missions, bursting and sprouting out in wonderful exuberance ready to be laid hold of by their greedy hands.

A political machine is a united minority working against a divided majority.

A war, or any wild-goose chase, is, as the vulgar use the phrase, a lucky turn-up of patronage for the minister, whose chief merit is the art of keeping himself in place.

It is a handicap to any man to succeed a member of his own party as President. He has little patronage with which to reward his personal supporters.

a political machine of the greatest importance of the state.

Chicago's been under the grip of the corrupt and broken political machine for as long as everybody's memory.

Political organizations are formed to keep the powerful in power.

An honest politician has no goodies to toss around. This limits his effectiveness profoundly, because political power in India is dispersed throughout a multi-tiered federal structure; a local official who has not been paid off can sometimes stop a billion-dollar project.

I'm wondering how many elected figures any of us could find who do not, in the front or back of their minds, remember who does them favors, who doesn't.

When the business interests... pushed through the first installment of civil service reform in 1883, they expected that they would be able to control both political parties equally.

After your first victory as New York Governor you gave jobs worth $3,000 to $20,000 per year to your friends and compatriots, and I returned to my garret and my crust, and my desperate battle with pecuniary obligations.

There can be no complete and permanent reform of the civil service until public opinion emancipates congressmen from all control and influence over government patronage ... No proper legislation is to be expected as long as members of Congress are engaged in procuring offices for their constituents

In politics there are very few self-made men—most are machine-made.

The success of any executive measure must now be bought by the use of political patronage in influencing the action of legislators.

I will devote none of my time to developing laws to increase my own patronage and multiply canvassers [electors] in my favor.

Bureaucracy is widespread in the unemployed movement.... There is direct appointment and removals of Unemployed Council functionaries by the Party committees. These functionaries are responsible not to the masses but to the Party committees.

I am not in Washington as a statesman. I am there as a very well paid messenger boy doing your errands. My chief occupation is going around with a forked stick picking up little fragments of patronage for my constituents.

Patronage can result in the entrenchment of one or a few [political] parties to the exclusion of others.

A President cannot call men from all parts of the country during the time between his nomination and his election, seek their advice, their counsel, their service, their cooperation in his personal behalf and in behalf of the party ... and also tell them in the same breath, to see the Secretary of War, the Attorney General and the Postmaster General about a presidential nomination.

Tammany Hall had taught me to be kind to those in trouble, to look after the sick in the tenements, to see that the widows had food and fuel and that the men had jobs.

Take from the United States the appointment of postmasters and let the towns elect them, and you deprive the Federal Government of half a million defenders.

Politics makes strange postmasters.

I sincerely wish we could see our government so secured as to depend less on the character of the person in whose hands it is trusted. Bad men will sometimes get in and with such an immense patronage may make great progress in corrupting the public mind and principles.

I shall at all times be ready to recognize the paramount claims of the soldiers of the nation in the disposition of public trusts [patronage].

Every President does it. It goes back to George Washington. I can’t say that past Administrations have asked the same questions, but the end result is the same—you put people on boards that you want.