"You better take advantage of the good cigars. You don't get much else in that job"
About this Quote
A backroom benediction disguised as a gripe: take the cigar, because the rest of the job won’t love you back. Tip O’Neill’s line works because it’s both comic and brutally accurate about political labor. The “good cigars” stand in for the small, tangible perks of power - the tokens that still feel real when everything else is abstract: shifting coalitions, impossible promises, constant scrutiny, and the slow grind of compromise that leaves no one fully satisfied.
O’Neill, a master of House-era retail politics, understood that public office is less a hero’s journey than a long siege. The sentence is structured like practical advice, but it smuggles in a worldview: politics doesn’t reliably deliver gratitude, clarity, or moral closure. What it does deliver is pressure, boredom, and blame. So you might as well pocket the minor comforts when they appear, not as corruption but as compensation for the psychic costs.
The subtext is also an insider’s warning about the mythology of Washington. People enter imagining impact and legacy; veterans learn that influence is incremental and victories are rarely clean. The cigar is a metaphor for the momentary pause, the brief sense of belonging in a profession that eats its own. There’s a faint Irish-Catholic, working-class pragmatism here too: don’t romanticize the gig; respect it, endure it, and don’t be ashamed of needing a small pleasure to make the endurance possible.
O’Neill, a master of House-era retail politics, understood that public office is less a hero’s journey than a long siege. The sentence is structured like practical advice, but it smuggles in a worldview: politics doesn’t reliably deliver gratitude, clarity, or moral closure. What it does deliver is pressure, boredom, and blame. So you might as well pocket the minor comforts when they appear, not as corruption but as compensation for the psychic costs.
The subtext is also an insider’s warning about the mythology of Washington. People enter imagining impact and legacy; veterans learn that influence is incremental and victories are rarely clean. The cigar is a metaphor for the momentary pause, the brief sense of belonging in a profession that eats its own. There’s a faint Irish-Catholic, working-class pragmatism here too: don’t romanticize the gig; respect it, endure it, and don’t be ashamed of needing a small pleasure to make the endurance possible.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work |
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