Drain The Swamp Quotes

Nancy Pelosi said that when it comes to cleaning up government, the Democrats have drained the swamp. The only problem with that is what's left after you drain the swamp: snakes everywhere. ~ Jay Leno

It's hard, when you're up to your armpits in alligators, to remember you came here to drain the swamp. ~ Ronald Reagan

Everything is going according to plan in this strategically fathomed notion of "country" where the population wholeheartedly believes in that fabled myth known as democracy. The corporations that profit from our endless war campaigns, who have a multifarious number of politicians at the top of their covert letterheads and on payroll always get what they pay for - a route to even more of our tax dollars. The status quo doesn't change with the election of any given politician, whether it be in the Senate, the Congress, or even the White House. This nation (i.e. notion) is, in and of itself, nothing but an ingeniously designed corporation that uses you and I to further perpetuate the myth of country, the myth of united, the myth of democracy, and the myth of patriotism. We have long passed the point where we the people sat on the tongue of this monstrosity. We now reside in the belly of the beast. ~ A.K. Kuykendall

What Mr. Friedman is suggesting is that if we don't drain the swamp where the rats are breeding, it won't really matter how many of these rats we kill; they will continue to leave the swamp and migrate to our cities in numbers that are legion. ~ Dick Couch

Sometimes I want to ride you like a wild horse, and bring you to the taming - did you know that? I can do it, you know I can. Drag you over the edge and drain you to a gasping husk. I can drive you to the edge of collapse and sometimes I delight in it, ~ Diana Gabaldon

The ideals of free enterprise and global leadership, central to American conservatism, are responsible for the greatest reduction in human misery since mankind began its long climb from the swamp to the stars. ~ Arthur C. Brooks

Then you may have to leave."
Hans felt the blood drain from his face, and Boris added, "I am not saying it is all your fault. I have fallen in love with you. I am to blame for that. But I do not know how Thomas will react."
"You still love Thomas, don't you?"
"Of course."
"So do I!"
Boris sighed and shook his head. "I do not think he will understand, puppy. Not right away."
Boris hadn't been willing to talk about it further. He'd retreated to his study and left Hans to fret about it the rest of the afternoon. Would Thomas actually send him away because he'd fallen in love with Boris?
But I love him too! I love them both.
Did it matter? Maybe Thomas wasn't willing to share that much of Boris. Maybe Hans had finally gone too far. Boris had, too, of course, but Thomas wouldn't send Boris away. He might think getting Hans out of the house would be enough to make Boris forget him.
When Thomas came home, Hans ran to the door like a faithful dog, terrified he'd be punished but unable to endure the agony of not knowing for one minute longer.
"Well, hello, puppy!" Thomas said, amused. He looked more closely at Hans's face and cocked an eyebrow. "Is something wrong?"
"I…."
"We have something to talk about," Boris said behind him ~ Jamie Fessenden

Starships were settlements in the sky. Some were villages; Ultimatum was a great metropolis. And yet even Star Destroyers functioned like small towns. A big sink full of gossip - and as with small towns, the contents all tended to flow toward one person, like water to a drain. ~ John Jackson Miller

Take words and make them useful,' she told me. 'drain them of all the crappy meanings they used to mean and make them mean something useful instead. ~ Scott Bradfield

Travellers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. We who were fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Here is one way to conceptualize NASA's heroic era: in 1961, Kennedy gave his "moon speech" to Congress, charging them to put an American on the moon "before the decade is out." In the eight years that unspooled between Kennedy's speech and Neil Armstrong's first historic bootprint, NASA, a newborn government agency, established sites and campuses in Texas, Florida, Alabama, California, Ohio, Maryland, Mississippi, Virginia, and the District of Columbia; awarded multi-million-dollar contracts and hired four hundred thousand workers; built a fully functioning moon port in a formerly uninhabited swamp; designed and constructed a moonfaring rocket, spacecraft, lunar lander, and space suits; sent astronauts repeatedly into orbit, where they ventured out of their spacecraft on umbilical tethers and practiced rendezvous techniques; sent astronauts to orbit the moon, where they mapped out the best landing sites; all culminating in the final, triumphant moment when they sent Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to step out of their lunar module and bounce about on the moon, perfectly safe within their space suits. All of this, start to finish, was accomplished in those eight years. ~ Margaret Lazarus Dean

The garden of Eden was a boggy swamp just south of Croydon. You can see it over there. ~ Peter Cook

The problem is that history is not a dialectic progression but a biome, a swamp where ideas chase each other around and wallow and where drupelets of their larvae cluster and then hatch to devour siblings. ~ Eugene Lim

Have a seat with me," Caine said, hopping down from the wall. "How have you been, Taylor?"
"Life's one big party," she said.
He laughed appreciatively at her joke. "Things must be pretty bad for Edilio to send for me, huh?"
"Things are always pretty bad," she said. "We're at a new level of bad. I saw those bugs."
Caine mustered all his sincerity. "I have to go and fight these creatures. But I don't know much about them."
Taylor told him what she knew. Caine felt some of his confidence drain away as she laid out the facts in gruesome detail and with complete conviction.
"Well, this should be fun," Diana said dryly. "I'm so glad we came back. ~ Michael Grant

The universe is but a tenement
of all things visible. Darkness and day
the passing guests of Time.
Life slips away,
a dream of little joy and mean content.

Ah! wise the old philosophers who sought
To lengthen their long sunsets among flowers,
By stealing the young night's unsullied hours
And the dim moments with sweet burdens fraught.

And now Spring beckons me with verdant hand,
And Nature's wealth of eloquence doth win
Forth to the fragrant-bowered nectarine,
Where my dear friends abide, a careless band.

There meet my gentle, matchless brothers, there
I come, the obscure poet, all unfit
To wear the radiant jewelry of wit,
And in their golden presence cloud the air.
And while the thrill of meeting lingers, soon
As the first courtly words, the feast is spread,
While, couched on flowers 'mid wine-cups flashing red,
We drink deep draughts unto The Lady Moon.

Then as without the touch of verse divine
There is no outlet for the pent-up soul,
'Twas ruled that he who quaffed no fancy's bowl
Should drain the "Golden Valley" cups of wine ~ Li Bai

Maya felt the turbulent maelstrom of emotions inside her, stirred by all she had seen on her circumnavigation, by all that had happened and all that was going to happen ... ah, the floods within her, the flash floods in her mind! If only she could accomplish the same yoking of her spirit that they had with this aquifer - drain it, control it, make it sane. But the hydrostatic pressures were so intense, the outbreaks when they came so fierce. No pipeline could hold it. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

When I was a kid, the neighbor woman, she'd been a partisan during the war, she told me a story about how their unit was surrounded but they escaped. She had her little baby with her, he was one month old, they were moving along a swamp, and there were Germans everywhere. The baby was crying. He might have given them away, they would have been discovered, the entire unit. And she suffocated him. She talked about this distantly, as if it hadn't been her, and the child wasn't hers. I can't remember now why she told me this. What I remember very clearly is my horror. What had she done? How could she? I thought the whole unit was getting out from the encirclement for that little baby, to save him. Whereas here, in order to save the life of strong healthy men, they choked this child. Then what's the point of life? I didn't want to live after that. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

Your prosperity consciousness is not dependent on money; your flow of money is dependent on your prosperity consciousness. As you can conceive of more, more will come into your life. There is an ocean of abundance available! There is plenty for everyone. You cannot rob another and they cannot rob you, and in no way can you drain the ocean dry ... there is always more. ~ Louise Hay

But I am not sick, or crazy, or broken.
I am Meda Melange, demon-saint monster girl. I make full-grown men scream in terror. I break bones and drain blood. I turn nightmares into reality.
I am the most powerful creature on earth. I do not wear a leash. ~ Eliza Crewe

As I ran water to wash my hands, my earbud fell out of my ear and went down the drain.
"Crap!"
I hauled my cellphone out of my bag and texted Ranger. Bad news. Your earbud just went down the drain in the ladies room.
It was only a matter of time, he textd back. ~ Janet Evanovich

For twenty-five years I've been speaking and writing in defense of your right to happiness in this world, condemning your inability to take what is your due, to secure what you won in bloody battles on the barricades of Paris and Vienna, in the American Civil War, in the Russian Revolution. Your Paris ended with Petain and Laval, your Vienna with Hitler, your Russia with Stalin, and your America may well end in the rule of the Ku Klux Klan! You've been more successful in winning your freedom than in securing it for yourself and others. This I knew long ago. What I did not understand was why time and again, after fighting your way out of a swamp, you sank into a worse one. Then groping and cautiously looking about me, I gradually found out what has enslaved you: YOUR SLAVE DRIVER IS YOU YOURSELF. No one is to blame for your slavery but you yourself. No one else, I say! ~ Wilhelm Reich

Without freedom of speech, I might be in the swamp. ~ Bob Dylan

The actual fights themselves are very demanding. You don't want to drain yourself. But it pumps you up, gets you in the zone. It's a good way of getting you into the zone for the scene. ~ Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje

The soy is seeping through the material like a BP oil slick in a Louisiana swamp. ~ Poppet

The die is cast in Canada: there are two ethnic and linguistic groups; each is too strong and too deeply rooted in the past, too firmly bound to a mother culture, to be able to swamp the other. But if the two will collaborate inside of a truly pluralist state, Canada could become a privileged place where the federalist form of government, which is the government of tomorrow's world, will be perfected. ~ Pierre Trudeau

Any place in our lives and heart where we are exerting our will and ways over God's will and ways will inevitably drain us of energy and resources. Exertion=Exhaustion. On the other hand, death to self requires only that we lay down at the foot of the cross and give up the right to run our lives. We say with Christ, "Not my will but Yours be done Father." The Crucified life is the entrance into true rest. #ComeAndDie ~ John Burton

There were many deficits in our swamp education, but Grandpa Sawtooth, to his credit, taught us the names of whole townships that had been forgotten underwater. Black pioneers, Creek Indians, moonshiners, women, 'disappeared' boy soldiers who deserted their army camps. From Grandpa we learned how to peer beneath the sea-glare of the 'official, historical' Florida records we found in books. "Prejudice," as defined by Sawtooth Bigtree, was a kind of prehistoric arithmetic
a "damn, fool math"
in which some people counted and others did not. It meant white names on white headstones in the big cemetery in Cypress Point, and black and brown bodies buried in swamp water.
At ten, I couldn't articulate much but I got the message: to be a true historian, you had to mourn amply and well. ~ Karen Russell

Dispel, v.
It was the way you said, "I have something to tell you." I could feel the magic drain from the room. ~ David Levithan

The modern sensibility attempts to drain the contents of experience; these Greek poets strive to state the fact so poignantly that it becomes an ever-flowing spring as Sappho says, More real than real, more gold than gold. ~ Kenneth Rexroth

Without the help of selfishness, the human animal would never have developed. Egoism is the vine by which man hoisted himself out of the swamp and escaped from the jungle. ~ Blaise Cendrars

The rinsed foam swirled into one drain that always clogged come October when the maples dropped Canadian propaganda over everything. ~ Daniel Handler

It disturbed me that the music industry had gone down the drain, even though people were listening to more music than ever and from a greater diversity of artists. ~ Daniel Ek

In truth we re-create our reputation every day. Journalists with thirty years of credibility have washed their careers down the drain with one plagiarized paragraph. ~ Anonymous

I had trouble listening to adults who didn't really mean anything that they said; it was as if their language poured into my ears only to drain right out a little spigot in the back of my head. ~ Reif Larsen

The message was crystal clear: the Beltway - right, left, and center - is an unprincipled swamp. Its denizens spend most of their time raising money to keep the lights on. The creative fires do not burn here. Those who light them are quickly sent home. Others lose heart working long hours for bad pay under indifferent management. Meanwhile, the cynical and soulless all too often find their way to promotions and permanent positions in the oligarchy. ~ James O'Keefe

All that was left was the recollection of having had a good idea, a recurrent experience of having had a good, an excellent, a most important idea, a truly fundamental idea, but one never remembered itself the idea from one moment to the next, memory was something you simply couldn't depend on, a man's memory set him traps he'd walk into and find himself hopelessly lost in, Konrad said, a man's memory lured him into a trap and then deserted him; it happened over and over again that a man's memory lured him into a trap, or several traps, thousands of traps, and then deserted him, left him all alone, alone in limitless despair because he felt drain of all thought; Konrad had come to observe this geriatric phenomenon and had begun to be more and more terrified of it, he was in fact prepared to state that a man's youthful memory was capable of turning into an old man's memory from one moment to the next, with no warning whatsoever, suddenly you found yourself with an old man's memory, unprepared by such warning signals as a failure , from time to time, in trifling matters, brief lapses of omissions, the way a mental footbridge or gangplank might give a bit as one passed over it; no, old age set in from one moment to the next, many a man made this abrupt passage from youth to age quite early in life, a sudden shift from being the youngest to the oldest of men, a characteristic of so-called brain workers, who tended, basically, not to have a so-called extended youth, no gradual tra ~ Thomas Bernhard

Sir, you have tasted two whole worms; you have hissed all my mystery lectures and been caught fighting a liar in the quad; you will leave by the next town drain. ~ William Archibald Spooner

There is hardly a place on Earth where people do not log, pave, spray, drain, flood, graze, fish, plow, burn, drill, spill or dump. There is no life zone, with the possible exception of the deep ocean, that we are not degrading. ~ Donella Meadows

After the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia offered its new structure of government to the states for ratification, members of the Dismal Swamp Company differed in their opinions of it. Visitors to Mount Vernon heard George Washington say that he was "very anxious" to see all states ratify the Constitution. Alexander Donald wrote: "I never saw him so keen for any thing in my life, as he is for the adoption of the new Form of Government." Conversations at Mount Vernon touched on demagogues winning state elections to pursue "their own schemes," on the "impotence" of the Continental Congress, and on the danger of "Anarchy and civil war." Washington concluded: "it is more than probable we shall exhibit the last melancholy proof, that Mankind are not competent to their own government without the means of coercion in the Sovereign." By "sovereign" he meant not the people but the national government. Without a new, stronger government, he said, America faced "impending ruin. ~ Charles Royster

He had wandered with innocence and naivete into this web, and now every move would wrap him tighter. Each lie would stick to the others, until one day he would find himself in a tight little cocoon, trapped and suffocating from the thousands of little fibs that living and working in that cursed swamp of a city seemed to require every man to ooze. ~ Hugh Howey

Even for an inbred clan deep in the swamp, she thought they might well be considered a peculiar bunch, but then the family always had run to eccentricity. ~ Robert Dunbar

I always feel like it is a privilege to be able to be an artist and to be able to exhibit my work all over the world. ~ Jim Drain

With women, my wiring shorts out. My senses respond to the physical and the chemical, the scent and sheen of her. Evil could not possibly reside in the form of this angel. Or could it? Sure, I'm politically incorrect. I admit it; I confess; guilty as charged. I am, Your Honor, the lowest of the species, still wet from the swamp, webbed feet fossilized in the mud. I am a Man! ~ Paul Levine

Are you familiar with Saint Cuthman?" Alfred asked me cheerfully.
"No, lord."
"He was a hermit," Alfred said. We were riding north, keeping on the high ground with the swamp to our left. "His mother was crippled and so he made her a wheelbarrow."
"A wheelbarrow? What could a cripple do with a wheelbarrow?"
"No, no, no! He pushed her about in it! So she could be with him as he preached. He pushed her everywhere."
"She must have liked that."
"There's no written life of him that I know of,' Alfred said, 'but we must surely compose one. He could be a saint for mothers?"
"Or for wheelbarrows, lord. ~ Bernard Cornwell

For the first time since hearing about the Treaty of Versailles in detail, Mondaugen found himself crying. They'll drain his juices, he thought; caress his bones with their paw-pads, gag on his fine white hair. ~ Anonymous

No one we knew ever believed that there was anything between us but the sex and some virulent allure, my dirty dishwater circling the drain of you. Not a pretty comparison but maybe it's the best we'll ever deserve, either of us. ~ Caitlin R. Kiernan