A Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson
From Washington, proverbially "the city of distances," through all its cities, states, and territories, it is a country of beginnings, of projects, of designs, and expectations.
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We have states. And we have cities. And we have counties. And we have the private sector. And - and so the country still works even when Washington's dysfunctional.
Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.
I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth; I came from really humble beginnings - the projects of New York City - and I worked my way to get to where I am.
When you turn 18 in the United States, you should be automatically registered to vote. Ideally, this sensible reform would be a federal law affecting all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and American territories, but our federal government stopped being sensible a very long time ago.
The city of Washington is in some respects self-contained, and it is easy there to forget what the rest of the United States is thinking about. I count it a fortunate circumstance that almost all the windows of the White House and its offices open upon unoccupied spaces that stretch to the banks of the Potomacand that as I sit there I can constantly forget Washington and remember the United States.
In conformity with these designs on the city of Washington, and notwithstanding the disastrous results of the invasion of 1862, it was determined by the Rebel government last summer to resume the offensive in that direction.
I've seen a lot of the United States, having stayed in so many different cities and towns for work. It's such a strange and fascinating country, and instead of learning about it through a textbook, I would rather discover its history and traditions and institutions through fiction and nonfiction writers.
I think the city of Washington itself is insular to a certain extent. You have to get out in the country to realize what is going on and discover that the perceptions in Washington aren't necessarily accurate.
Californians have brought suburb-making almost to an art. Their cities and their country-side are equally suburban. No-one has a country house in California; no-one has a city house. It is good to see trees always from city windows, but it is not so good always to see houses from country windows.
We underestimate the distance between ourselves and others. Not just inferential distance, but distances of temperament and ability, distances of situation and resource, distances of unspoken knowledge and unnoticed skills and luck, distances of interior landscape.
To me, the most powerful people in this country, politically, are mayors. If you took all the mayors of the 25 biggest cities and you got them together, you could do more on that level than you ever could through the bureaucracy in Washington.
Along the iron veins that traverse the frame of our country, beat and flow the fiery pulses of its exertion, hotter and faster every hour. All vitality is concentrated through those throbbing arteries into the central cities; the country is passed over like a green sea by narrow bridges, and we are thrown back in continually closer crowds on the city gates.
I don't like going to cities. I don't mind maybe being in a city sometimes for a few hours, but I pretty much don't like cities. I don't even like passing through them.
If you've been to the city of Malmo in Sweden, or to Berlin or to Hamburg or to London or to Paris in the suburbs, or Rotterdam in my own country. You see many cities where there is a city within a city - where even today in the United Kingdom - I don't know if you're aware of that - there are even sharia courts active, whether it's rulings that the worth of a woman is half of that of a man.
Some types of environmental restoration projects are well-known; restored wetlands, for instance, or coal mine reclamation projects. Recently though, larger dam removal projects have started, a number of them in Washington state.
But 'This Town' is official Washington. It's political Washington. It's not the Washington that clogs New York Avenue. It's not the Washington that lives in Gaithersburg. It's not the Washington that accounts for most of the population. 'This Town' refers to the people who think they run your country.
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