Art & Creativity Quote by Dick Morris

"Washington is a mean town where human sacrifice has been raised to an art form" lands because it takes a bloodless concept - political attrition - and forces you to picture something physical, ritualized, almost religious. Morris isn’t merely calling the capital petty. He’s arguing that cruelty in Washington is not an accident of competition but a cultivated craft: reputations offered up, careers burned, friendships severed, all to feed the appetite of the institution.

The phrase "mean town" does a lot of work. It shrinks the imperial aura of the federal government into something small, clannish, and vindictive, like a place where everyone knows your business and uses it against you. Then "human sacrifice" flips the usual heroic story of public service into a story of disposability: people are the currency, not the beneficiaries. "Raised to an art form" is the cynical twist, suggesting sophistication and taste applied to destruction - opposition research, leaks, televised humiliation, the slow drip of scandal. It’s not chaos; it’s technique.

Context matters: Morris built a career inside the machinery he’s condemning, most famously as a Clinton-era adviser who later reinvented himself as a commentator. That insider-outsider posture is the subtext. The line reads as indictment, but also as a kind of absolution: if the town is sacrificial by design, then individual moral compromises can be reframed as survival. The quote flatters the audience’s suspicion of Washington while also warning them that the system rewards those who learn the knife work.