- [first lines]
- Crime Reporter: Once again, as the MGM crime reporter, it is my privilege to bring you another episode in our "Crime Does Not Pay" series. For obvious reasons, fictitious names are used for all characters.
- Boss Bailey: Clean Government League voters who stay home are just as important as machine voters who go to the polls.
- Mayor James Wheelock: [listening to a whistleblower on a radio broadcast] I'll go on the radio and denounce that fellow as a phoney.
- Boss Bailey: The voters won't listen to that stuff. This is what the suckers are interested in.
- Boss Bailey: [turns the radio back on, switching stations] Swing bands... Comedians... Prize fights... And on election day, they'll do everything but go to the polls and vote. Oh, they'll get in their morning game of golf, have time for beauty treatments, mark the bargain sales, worry about their business, throw their weekly bridge parties, and take time off for ballgames. But they will *not* go to the polls and vote. They just don't care that much.
- Diner Counterman: There's only one way to clean it up, and that's the way they done it in Europe - with a strong man!
- William Wright: What do you think Boss Bailey was? He rewrote plenty of laws. He faked elections; he pushed people around. That's why we ran him out. Now - did you vote?
- Diner Counterman: No...
- William Wright: Then just shut up - and stay shut up.
- William Wright: [reading headline] "Machine Wins Again!" - those dirty crooks.
- Diner Counterman: [grabbing newspaper] So what? Let me see how the Yanks did.
- [last lines]
- Attorney General Edward Gibbon: Today, democracy is on trial, and the outcome depends far less on the spies and fifth columnists of hostile nations than on how well we cherish our great distinguishing right - the free and secret ballot. If ever your one vote seems not to mean very much, just pause and reflect that, for millions elsewhere who felt the same way, government of the people, by the people, and for the people *has* perished from the Earth.