Washington isn't a city, it's an abstraction.

New York was a city where you could be frozen to death in the midst of a busy street and nobody would notice.

I call Washington 'the city of the perishable.'

I served with General Washington in the Legislature of Virginia... and... with Dr. Franklin in Congress. I never heard either of them speak ten minutes at a time, nor to any but the main point.

It is an excellent habit to look at things as so many symbols.

People who are too fastidious towards the finite never reach actuality, but linger in abstraction, and their light dies away.