Too small to be a state but too large to be an asylum for the mentally — Washington, D.C.

"In the city of Washington, where virtue dies in the immoral sewage as it putrefies, those who tell the most brazen, despicable lies, and accumulate sound bites that self-aggrandize, trade their souls in for power that they exercise for their personal profit, to no great surprise."

"After much menutial search for an elligible situation, prompted I may say from a fear of being prejudiced in favour of a first opinion I could discover no one so advantageously to greet the congressional building as is that on the west end of Jenkins heights which stand as a pedestal waiting for a monument, and I am confident, were all the wood cleared from the ground no situation could stand in competition with this. some might perhaps require less labour to be rendered agreeable but after all assistance of arts none ever would be made so grand and all other would appear but of secondary nature."

"This is truly the capital... And the capital of the most important nation in the world—so there is more protocol here... If you want to know who next U.S. president will be, you cannot stay within the beltway... I always tell my staff that this is a big country with a history."

"Washington is a city where dwell many of the first men of the land, and the women they married when they were young."

"Washington isn’t like everywhere else. The city’s economy is tied directly to the size of the federal budget, which has grown virtually without pause since the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The District of Columbia and its surrounding suburbs are now the wealthiest metro region in the country. Washington’s job market is effectively bulletproof. Political figures cycle in and out of government, from lobbying to finance to contracting and back, growing richer at every turn. In Washington, prosperity is all but guaranteed. To the rest of the country, this looks like corruption, because, essentially, it is. But if you live there, it’s all upside. The most interesting effect of uninterrupted economic growth is that the culture of the city remains unusually stable. Even as Washington’s population has grown exponentially over the years, many things about the city haven’t changed at all. Most of the affluent neighborhoods look the same demographically as they did in 1960. Mothers don’t work. Divorce is unusual. Housing prices almost never fall. It’s a cultural time capsule. By voter registration, D.C. is the most Democratic city in America. Yet the instincts of the people who live there are deeply conservative. Washingtonians hate change. More than anything, they hate to be told they’re wrong, or their ideas are stupid, especially when they are."

"We start from scratch, every generation. History does not bend inevitably toward justice, or freedom, or decency, or even stability. History doesn’t do that in Hong Kong, or in Moscow, or in Washington or New York City or Los Angeles. History goes where we push it. And if we don’t push, someone else will."