Thomas Jefferson Quotes

The White House seems to be a sound-proof booth.

The White House used to belong to the American people. At least that's what I learned from history books and from covering every president starting with John F. Kennedy.

Can anyone understand how it is to have lived in the White House and then, suddenly, to be living alone as the President's widow?

It is true that when you're in the White House alone, it is a lonely place. Big and lonely.

I had some adventures at the White House, but hardly enough to fill a full memoir.

We are practically an island here [the White House.]

[Describing the White House:] Big enough for two emperors, one Pope and the Grand Lama.

The world knows how reluctantly I accepted this issue of battle forced upon me on my advent to this place [the White House] by the internal enemies of our country.

You don't make new friends in the White House.

I see the White House as like a subway. You have to put coins in to open the gates.

You have turned me out; you have turned me out.

Who would want to hang around with these shits anyway?.

The White House is much bigger than it looks. There are really six floors with two small mezzanine levels: two belowground floors; the ground floor, where the main kitchen is located; the State Floor (or the first floor); two mezzanine levels with the chief usher’s office and the pastry kitchen; the second floor (family living quarters); and the third floor (also family living quarters).

It's a very dangerous and lonely thing, I imagine, to be a spy: to have friendships that are deceptions, that are not honest.

I think that scandal and intrigue and all of those sort of things that occur behind closed doors - whether it's on the Hill or in the White House - people all find intriguing.

I don't trust anybody.

There are all these people here I don't know by sight or by name. And we pass alongside each other and don't have any connection. And they don't know me and I don't know them. And now I'm leaving town and there are all these people I will never know.

The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.

That's the strangest thing about this life, about being in the ministry. People change the subject when they see you coming. And then sometimes those very same people come into your study and tell you the most remarkable things. There's a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn't really expect to find it, either.

I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House. I am living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father's child has.

Nobody is a friend of ours. Let's face it.

As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.

I don’t need friends. All they do is eat your food, drink your beer, then spew your secrets the first time you do something that displeases them. No offense, but when you have as many enemies as I do, you keep your secrets under lock and key. (Solin)

All the suffering that humanity ever knew can be traced to the one fact that no man in the history of the Galaxy ... could really understand one another. Every human being lived behind an impenetrable wall of choking mist within which no other but he existed.

The tyrant now Trusts not to men: nightly within his chamber The watch-dog guards his couch, the only friend He now dare trust.