Evan Bayh Quotes

Clinton feels a profound alienation from the Washington culture here, and I happen to agree with him.

Washington is totally out of touch with mainstream America.

When you visit a foreign city you are in it, but not of it, separated by a glass wall. Once, while a student, I was getting dressed in my ground-floor room when a family of Italians crossed the grass to watch, as if I were laid on for their amusement and instruction.

I decided to go to Latin America because many of my students in Washington emigrated from this region and inspired me to learn more about their home countries.

Michigan is two radically different places - the North and the South which makes for good drama and contrast.

Most of the writers in TV are from L.A. or New York, and those are places where people are cynical and snarky. And they fly from L.A. to New York in an airplane over this vast, expansive land where people aren't snarky; they're a lot more like the 'Parks and Rec' characters.

An awful lot of Republicans, both in Washington and outside Washington, are resigned to leaving Obamacare in effect.

Fantasy is the tendency of Americans, going back to colonial times, to look at the Middle East as a type of fractured mirror of the United States - a type of mirror that could look a lot more like the United States, if, say, a Middle Eastern George Washington would emerge.

Washington is still very much a male-oriented culture. Being from Los Angeles, I think it is less so there - there is less attachment to tradition, perhaps, there is more flexibility, more acceptance of change generally. That is partly because of Hollywood.

Isn't that wonderful? When we drove through several of the places we lived - Grand Rapids, Washington - they all had those placards. That they stood by the street and had in their hands placards that said 'Gerald Our Ford'. That meant so much to us as we were driving into Washington.

In Washington, there's always an effort to label people.

The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.

There are certainly days that we can convince ourselves in Washington that everybody's talking about one thing, and then I'll go home to my district and realize that everybody's actually talking about something different.

When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.

Events in America show the extent to which democracy there is fuelled by populism - Barack Obama's victory is a manifestation not of Washington's need for change, but of America's. That is not how democracy works in England.

People in the United Kingdom and outside the United States share my bemusement with the United States that America doesn't share with itself.

As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides - man to woman, American to Japanese, and present to past.

If people and their manner of living were alike everywhere, there would not be much point in moving from one place to another.

I hate to confess that I would love to have all of my children in Washington - and at the same time, they've been all over the place, and my heart of hearts, I believe that freedom is wonderful.

People assume that I came back to Washington because of the 'Post', but the truth is less romantic. I came back for a job.

In Washington the politicians lie on the record and tell the truth off the record. In the Middle East, it’s the opposite. They lie off the record, and tell the truth on the record.

We truly have a balance of power. The Republicans control Washington and the Democrats control Hollywood.

I never spoke to this many Yankees at one time.

The product of Washington is politics. Other places produce steel.