Word: Washington DC

The Washington Smart Set, like others I have glimpsed, is too much concerned with smartness to be interesting - Maurice Slayton, 1898

Washington is the city where the big men of little towns come to be disillusioned - Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1900

Washington is the graveyard of reputations as well as the cradle of fame - A. Maurice Low, 1900

This is a town of people who spend their time sitting at desks, writing little things on pieces of paper, dictating letters into machines, talking on the telephone to people they never see. - Anonymous bureaucrat, 1943

Even if Judgment Day is well advertised in advance, I'm quite sure there will be a party going on in Washington - Vera Bloom, 1944

Bourgeois town - Leadbelly, 1959

When you arrived it was snowing. When you reached the hotel it was sleeting. When you went to bed it was raining. During the night it froze hard, and the wind blew some chimneys down. When you got up in the morning it was foggy. When you finished your breakfast at ten o'clock and went out, the sunshine was brilliant, the weather balmy and delicious, and the mud and slush deep and all pervading. You will like the climate-when you get used to it. . . . Take an umbrella, an overcoat, and a fan, and so forth. - Mark Twain

What do you want: a Disneyland for the rich or a state for free people? - Julius Hobson

I am. . . here amid all this huge mess of traitors, loafers, hospitals, axe-grinders, & incompetencies & officials that goes by the name of Washington. - Walt Whitman