Right here in this heart and home and fountain-head of law--in this great factory where are forged those rules that create good order and compel virtue and honesty in the other communities of the land, rascality achieves its highest perfection. Here rewards are conferred for conniving at dishonesty, but never for exposing it...I meet a man in the Avenue, sometimes, ...a clerk of a high grade in one of the Departments; but he was a stranger and had no rules of action for his guidance except some effete maxims of integrity picked up in Sunday school that snare to the feet of the unsophisticated!--and some unpractical moral wisdom instilled into him by his mother, who meant well, poor soul, but whose teachings were morally bound to train up her boy for the poor-house.
- Letter to Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, March 7, 1868

Washington is no doubt the boss town in the country for a man to live in who wants to get all the pleasure he can in a given number of months. But I wasn't built that way. I don't want the earth at one gulp. All of us are always losing some pleasure that we might have if we could be everywhere at once. I lose Washington, for instance, for the privilege of saving my life. My doctor told me that if I wanted my three score and 10, I must go to bed early, keep out of social excitements, and behave myself. You can't do that in Washington. Nobody does.
- quoted in interview in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 19, 1889, p. 20

There is something good and motherly about Washington, the grand old benevolent National Asylum for the helpless.
- The Gilded Age