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W Quotes

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All W Quotes

“Washington is a city of spectacles. Every four years, imposing Presidential inaugurations attract the great and the mighty. Kings, prime ministers, heroes and celebrities of every description have been feted there for more than 150 years. But in its entire glittering history, Washington had never seen a spectacle of the size and grandeur that assembled there on August 28, 1963. Among the nearly 250,000 people who journeyed that day to the capital, there were many dignitaries and many celebrities, but the stirring emotion came from the mass of ordinary people who stood in majestic dignity as witnesses to their single-minded determination to achieve democracy in their time. They came from almost every state in the union; they came in every form of transportation; they gave up from one to three days' pay plus the cost of transportation, which for many was a heavy financial sacrifice. They were good-humored and relaxed, yet disciplined and thoughtful. They applauded their leaders generously, but the leaders, in their own hearts, applauded their audience. Many a Negro speaker that day had his respect for his own people deepened as he felt the strength of their dedication. The enormous multitude was the living, beating heart of an infinitely noble movement. It was an army without guns, but not without strength. It was an army into which no one had to be drafted. It was white and Negro, and of all ages. It had adherents of every faith, members of every class, every profession, every political party, united by a single ideal. It was a fighting army, but no one could mistake that its most powerful weapon was love.”

“Washington is certainly not a city of restaurants, any more than it is a city of theaters. It is a city of official cocktail parties and excellent home-cooked dinners with wonderful conversation afterward and that provides all the entertaining anyone needs. It's also a city of whispering, maneuvering, tattling, declaiming - a city that's still having growing pains, that naive in spite of its imagined sophistication, that's beautiful in the same way an adolescent is beautiful, though he insists on pretending to a maturity and a mellowness that he hasn't achieved.”

“Washington is dead! This great man fought against Tyranny; he established the liberty of his country. His memory will always be dear to the French people, as it will be to all free men of the two worlds; and especially to French soldiers, who, like him and the American soldiers, have combated for liberty and equality.”

“Washington, like most scholarly Virginians of his time, was a Deist... Contemporary evidence shows that in mature life Washington was a Deist, and did not commune, which is quite consistent with his being a vestryman. In England, where vestries have secular functions, it is not unusual for Unitarians to vestrymen, there being no doctrinal subscription required for that office. Washington's letters during the Revolution occasionally indicate his recognition of the hand of Providence in notable public events, but in the thousands of his letters I have never been able to find the name of Christ or any reference to him. {Conway was employed to edit Washington's letters}”

“Washington politicians basically view the People as a capricious and dangerous enemy, a dumb mob whose only interesting quality happens to be their power to take away politicians' jobs... When the government sees its people as the enemy, sooner or later that feeling gets to be mutual. And that's when the real weirdness begins.”

“Washington's all abstraction. It's about access to power and nothing else. I mean, I'm sure it's fun if you're living next door to Seinfeld, or To Wolfe, or Mike Bloomberg, but living next door to them isn't what New York is about, In Washington people literally talk about how many feet away from John Kerry's house their own house is. The neighborhoods are all so blah, the only thing that turns people on is proximity to power. It's a total fetish culture. People get this kind of orgasmic shiver when they tell you they sat next to Paul Wolfowitz at a conference or got invited to Grover Norquist's breakfast.”