In the past, whistleblowers have had their desks moved to break rooms, broom closets, and basements. It's a clever punishment, good-government activists say, that exploits a gray area in the law. The whole thing can look minor on paper. They moved your office. So what?

David Fahrenthold

I was living in my coach's basement.

Adam Rippon

In September 1968, Rush played for around 20 people at a small hall in a church basement. We played songs like 'Spoonful,' 'Fire' and 'Born Under a Bad Sign,' and got paid $10. Then we went to a nearby deli and ordered Cokes and French fries and started planning our future.

Alex Lifeson

I met my first boyfriend when we were 13, playing 'Dungeons and Dragons' in the basement of my local comics shop. We were from the same small town in Maine but went to different schools.

Alexander Chee

I love having a basement.

Alice Ripley

I like the Hotel Costes, on rue Saint Honore, a boutique hotel near the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre and the Tuileries. I love the dark, moody decor as well as the fantastic scented, candlelit pool in the basement.

Alice Temperley

Last year, I made a refrigerator in my basement. And I needed to because I needed to figure how - you know there is no such thing as 'cold.' There is only less heat.

Alton Brown

Impulse decisions can often be our downfall when it comes to sticking to good habits. Do something to buy yourself some time when you're experiencing those 'moments' of weakness, and often, the urge will pass. If you keep the cookies in a box in the basement, you might find it's not worth the effort to go get them.

Amy Morin

I wrote a best-selling book, and if you don't believe me, you can come into my basement; I'll show you every copy.

Anthony Scaramucci

I was a busboy, a waiter, a manager, a sommelier... like... all of it from a family-run Polish restaurant, with, like, grandmas in the basement hand-making pierogies, to working at Bond Street for a while. I've done it all.

Antoni Porowski

A journalistic purpose could be someone with a Xerox machine in a basement.

Antonin Scalia

My mom's whole side of the family, they're all Packers fans. My mom's a Bears fan. My stepdad is a Vikings guy. So that gets ugly. My mom sits upstairs watching the Bears game; he sits in the basement. They can't watch it together. Football's a violent anger in our family dynamic.

Ashton Kutcher

I got addicted to Tetris, playing it in my basement, I was missing all these airplane flights over it. After the fourth one that I missed, I realized I needed to get rid of this thing - so ever since then, I don't play video games any more.

Bam Margera

The best movie theater in the world is in a dingy basement on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The worn seats are painful. There are probably bigger screens in half the apartments in the complex above the theater. And forget Fandango; the theater barely has a website. You want to buy a ticket? Get in line.

Bari Weiss

Making the most of global trade opportunities does not mean transitioning to a low-tax, deregulatory, 'Bargain Basement' economy. It means developing a robust Industrial Strategy intertwined with a strong trade agenda.

Barry Gardiner

In effect, you cannot stop Iraq from growing nasty bugs in the basement. You can stop them from putting operational warheads on working missiles and launching them at their neighbors.

Barton Gellman

My mother gets all mad at me if I stay in a hotel. I'm 31-years-old, and I don't want to sleep on a sleeping bag down in the basement. It's humiliating.

Ben Affleck

It's nowhere near as intense as what I imagine an actor experiences backstage, but I feel a fluttering nervousness before a curtain goes up on a play. I mean, any play, anywhere - on Broadway or the Bowery or in a church basement.

Ben Brantley

I travel often, so my routine is always getting scrambled. But on a standard sort of day, I get up at 6, pack lunches, hustle the kids off to school, then brew a pot of coffee and head downstairs to the dungeon, as I call it: my cobwebby office in the basement.

Benjamin Percy

You're just these kids from a small town. You get a record deal, and everything just goes so fast. In the span of five albums... in a way, the band that you started in your bedroom, or your basement or your garage, kind of becomes not your band anymore. It becomes something bigger than you could have known. No one really prepares you.

Benji Madden

The 'International Style of Modernism' came with the advent of building services. In the end, the architecture became like a container space, essentially like a boring box with a basement full of machinery to make it inhabitable. As a result, buildings literally started to look identical all over the planet.

Bjarke Ingels