Quotes About Identity

I'm not a robot. I'm a freak of the universe ... a thinking animal ... and I'm trying to see my way clear through this morass.

How glorious it is – and also how painful – to be an exception.

Les grands artistes n'ont pas de patrie. Great artists have no country.

Great artists have no country.

Confession also means confessing to an assignment. "Who are you?" The austere figure of John the Baptist stands there and says: "I am the one crying in the wilderness." Confession means proclaiming, praising and really spreading the word.

If anyone thinks he is something when he is nothing, he deceives himself.

There's something called the 'Washington Read,' which is the habit of many locals to go into a bookstore, pull a book off the shelf, rifle through the index to see if they're in there.

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

I was born in Washington, D.C., and I was raised in Milwaukee.

I don't want anybody suspecting I am some sheep and part of the Washington D.C. establishment.

People like to pigeonhole and say, Well, I'm a Washington insider, and you know, that's quite silly. What does that even mean?

Watch me when people say deaf and dumb, or deaf mute, and I give them a look like you might get if you called Denzel Washington the wrong name.

I often hear them accuse Israel of Judaizing Jerusalem. That's like accusing America of Americanizing Washington, or the British of Anglicizing London. You know why we're called 'Jews'? Because we come from Judea.

I am making sure, as the governor of a territory, that our kids speak fluent English. But having said that, I will tell my wife I love her in Spanish, and I will pray in Spanish, and no one from Washington should come down here and tell us how to go about it.

I don't think I'm really open to having Washington change me.

Martha Washington. I think she's done herself a disservice in history with a little cap, you know? She looks like a namby-pamby little grandmotherly type, but she turned out to be a very strong woman.

I know I'm the No. 1 quarterback for the Washington Redskins, and that's all that matters in my heart. That's all I wanted. I wanted a team that wanted me, and I found that.

George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were gay, just for starters. They didn't have a name for it, but their primary affections and intellectual attractions were all for other men.

Ever since I've become chairman, there have been profiles of me in People, George, The Washington Post, The Detroit News, and all of them could have been written by the same person.

It used to be that what was going to be written on my tombstone was 'Benjamin Wittes, former 'Washington Post' editorial writer,' or 'Benjamin Wittes, who wasn't even a lawyer.' Now it's just, like, 'Benjamin Wittes, who's a friend of Jim Comey's.'

There was a joke going around campus when I was at Washington State. It went, 'What's the difference between God and Ryan Leaf?' The punchline was, 'God doesn't think he's Ryan Leaf.'

I'm half Jewish half WASP.

I was a WASP kid going to a high school that was 99 percent Jewish and I wanted attention and I wanted to make a spectacle of myself because I couldn't stand to be ignored.

I was raised as an upper-class WASP in New England, and there was this old tradition there that everyone would simply be guided into the right way after Ivy League college and onward and upward. And it rejected me, I rejected it, and I ended up as a kind of refugee, really.