As the term of my relief from this place [Washington, D.C.] approaches, it's drudgery becomes more nauseating and intolerable, and... my impatience to be with you at Monticello increases daily.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Look a here people, listen to me, Don't try to find no home in Washington, D.C.... Lord, it's a bourgeois town, it's a bourgeois town.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
America is a much newer experiment in human living, one with moral concerns at its core. In this respect it differs from Europe, w...hich has preferred sophistication and worldly wisdom to "righteousness," and resembles China, which saw the universe itself as essentially a moral order. However materialistic Americans may be in their economic pursuits, their ceremonies emphasize the material far less than European societies have. America has imposing official architecture. Washington, D.C., boasts a radial baroque stateliness. Yet one of its most important buildings, the White House, is a modest dwelling, its scale far smaller than that of the palaces of Europe and Asia.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are always those who are willing to surrender local self-government and turn over their affairs to some national authority i...n exchange for a payment of money out of the Federal Treasury. Whenever they find some abuse needs correction in their neighborhood, instead of applying the remedy themselves they seek to have a tribunal sent on from Washington to discharge their duties for them, regardless of the fact that in accepting such supervision they are bartering away their freedom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For the people in government, rather than the people who pester it, Washington is an early-rising, hard-working city. It is a popu...lar delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... anything so delightful as Washington I have never seen elsewhere. There were a mingled simplicity and grandeur, a mingled stat...e and quiet intimacy, a brilliancy of conversation--the proud prominence of intellect over material prosperity which does not exist in any other city of the Union.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... what a strange time it was! Who knew his neighbor? Who was a traitor and who a patriot? The hero of to-day was the suspected o...f to-morrow.... There were traitors in the most secret council-chambers. Generals, senators, and secretaries looked at each other with suspicious eyes.... It is a great wonder that the city of Washington was not betrayed, burned, destroyed a half-dozen times.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I date the end of the old republic and the birth of the empire to the invention, in the late thirties, of air conditioning. Before... air conditioning, Washington was deserted from mid-June to September.... But after air conditioning and the Second World War arrived, more or less at the same time, Congress sits and sits while the presidents--or at least their staffs--never stop making mischief.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To-morrow I will have finished four-score years. I have lived to rise from the most despised and hated woman in all the world of f...ifty years ago, until now it seems as if I am loved by you all. If this is true, then I am indeed satisfied.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »