Potomac Quotes

I am fascinated to hear of the impact that ESOPs have had on work-force morale in corporations of all sizes such as Sears Roebuck, Potomac Electric Power, Lowe's Companies and the Dow Chemical Company. ~ Robert S. Strauss

WASHINGTONIAN, n. A Potomac tribesman who exchanged the privilege of governing himself for the advantage of good government. In justice to him it should be said that he did not want to. ~ Ambrose Bierce

The Potomac had taken away Linda and the boys.
The Rio Negro had given him Daniela.
One river had swallowed his heart; another river, halfway around the world, had gifted it back. A different heart, beaten up, scarred, but a beating heart at least. ~ Dana Marton

As of this moment, my ill-considered arrangement with Penny needs to be drowned in the Potomac, because I've tasted beautiful and I'm not letting her go. ~ Ainsley Booth

The Pentagon was built because World War Two was coming, and because World War Two was coming it was built without much steel. Steel was needed elsewhere, as always in wartime. Thus the giant building was a monument to the strength and mass of concrete. So much sand was needed for the mix it was dredged right out of the Potomac River, not far from the rising walls themselves. Nearly a million tons of it. The result was extreme solidity. ~ Lee Child

In the Army of the Shenandoah, you were the First Brigade! In the Army of the Potomac you were the First Brigade! In the Second Corps of this Army, you are the First Brigade! You are the First Brigade in the affections of your general, and I hope by your future deeds and bearing you will be handed down the posterity as the First Brigade in this our Second War of Independence. Farewell! ~ Stonewall Jackson

Abraham Lincoln wasn't much of a dancer. "Miss Todd, I should like to dance with you in the worst way," he told his future wife. Miss Todd later said to a friend, "He certainly did."

"John Quincy Adams was a first-rate swimmer. Once when he was skinny-dipping in the Potomac River, a women reporter snatched his clothes and sat on them until he gave her an interview."

"(Andrew Johnson couldn't read until he was fourteen! He didn't learn to write until after he was married!) ~ Judith St. George

Thought all the wilderness of America was in the West till the Ghost of the Susquehanna showed me different. No, there is a wilderness in the East; it's the same wilderness Ben Franklin plodded in the oxcart days when he was postmaster, the same as it was when George Washington was a wildbuck Indian-fighter, when Daniel Boone told stories by Pennsylvania lamps and promised to find the Gap, when Bradford built his road and men whooped her up in log cabins. There were not great Arizona spaces for the little man, just the bushy wilderness of eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, the backroads, the black-tar roads that curve among the mournful rivers like Susquehanna, Monongahela, old Potomac and Monocacy. ~ Jack Kerouac

I could as easily bail out the Potomac River with a teaspoon as attend to all the details of the army. ~ Abraham Lincoln

If you look at Washington, you see permanently camped on the banks of the Potomac spread around in concentric circles an army representing thousands of selfish interests. The sole purpose of their presence is to plunder, by hook or crook, the public treasury for the benefit of their particular people or corporations. ~ Charley Reese

As an early-and-often chronicler of Chicago-on-the-Potomac, I am amazed at the stubborn and clingy persistence of President Barack Obama's snowblowers in the media. See no scandal, hear no scandal, speak no scandal. ~ Michelle Malkin

I would rather die than be in the United States Senate. I would be bored to death. Could you imagine me, banging around that chamber with 99 other people, asking for a motion on the amendment in the subcommittee? Forget it ... You'd watch me just walk out and walk right into the Potomac River and drown. That would be it. ~ Chris Christie

Potomac School proved to be my first big adjustment - one that helped me with a basic lesson of growing up: learning to get along in whatever world one is deposited. ~ Katharine Graham

by a Scotch-Irish preacher, a Presbyterian named James Finley, in the year 1801, or before John Roebling was born. Finley had been a versatile and ingenious man. His "chain bridge" had a seventy-foot span, cost about six hundred dollars, and in the next ten years he built some forty more of them, including one over the Potomac above Washington. ~ David McCullough

I wish to see the sons and daughters of the world in Peace and busily employed in the more agreeable amusement of fulfilling the first and great commandment, Increase and Multiply : as an encouragement to which we have opened the fertile plains of the Ohio to the poor, the needy and the oppressed of the Earth; any one therefore who is heavy laden, or who wants land to cultivate, may repair thither and abound, as in the Land of promise, with milk and honey: the ways are preparing, and the roads will be made easy, thro' the channels of Potomac and James river. ~ George Washington

Growing up as a young black girl in Potomac, Maryland was easy. I had a Rainbow Coalition of friends of all ethnicities, and we would carelessly skip around our elementary school like the powerless version of Captain Planet's Planeteers. ~ Issa Rae

Congress displayed contempt for the city's residents, yet it retained a fondness for buildings and parks. In 1900, the centennial of the federal government's move to Washington, many congressmen expressed frustration that the proud nation did not have a capital to rival London, Paris, and Berlin. The following year, Senator James McMillan of Michigan, chairman of the Senate District Committee, recruited architects Daniel Burnham and Charles McKim, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to propose a park system. The team, thereafter known as the McMillan Commission, emerged with a bold proposal in the City Beautiful tradition, based on the White City of Chicago's 1893 Columbian Exposition. Their plan reaffirmed L'Enfant's avenues as the best guide for the city's growth and emphasized the majesty of government by calling for symmetrical compositions of horizontal, neoclassical buildings of marble and white granite sitting amid wide lawns and reflecting pools. Eventually, the plan resulted in the remaking of the Mall as an open lawn, the construction of the Lincoln Memorial and Memorial Bridge across the Potomac, and the building of Burnham's Union Station. Commissioned in 1903, when the state of the art in automobiles and airplanes was represented by the curved-dash Olds and the Wright Flyer, the station served as a vast and gorgeous granite monument to rail transportation. ~ Zachary M. Schrag

I live in Alexandria, Virginia. Near the Supreme Court chambers is a toll bridge across the Potomac. When in a rush, I pay the dollar toll and get home early. However, I usually drive outside the downtown section of the city and cross the Potomac on a free bridge. This bridge was placed outside the downtown Washington, DC area to serve a useful social service, getting drivers to drive the extra mile and help alleviate congestion during the rush hour. If I went over the toll bridge and through the barrier without paying the toll, I would be committing tax evasion ... If, however, I drive the extra mile and drive outside the city of Washington to the free bridge, I am using a legitimate, logical and suitable method of tax avoidance, and am performing a useful social service by doing so. For my tax evasion, I should be punished. For my tax avoidance, I should be commended. The tragedy of life today is that so few people know that the free bridge even exists. ~ Louis D. Brandeis

General, if you put every Union soldier now on the other side of the Potomac on that field to approach me over the same line, I will kill them all before they reach my line. ~ James Longstreet

When this sad war is over we will all return to our homes, and feel that we can ask no higher honor than the proud consciousness that we belonged to the Army of the Potomac. ~ George B. McClellan

I'm done doing this!' Obama said, finally erupting. 'We've all agreed on a plan. And we're all going to stick to that plan. I haven't agreed to anything beyond that.'

The 30,000 was a 'hard cap,' he said forcefully. 'I don't want enablers to be used as wiggle room. The easy thing for me to do - politically - would actually be to say no' to the 30,000. Then he gestured out the Oval Office windows, across the Potomac, in the direction of the Pentagon. Referring to Gates and the uniformed military, he said. 'They think it's the opposite. I'd be perfectly happy -' He stopped mid-sentence. 'Nothing would make Rahm happier than if I said no to the 30,000.'

There was some subdued laughter.

'Rahm would tell me it'd be much easier to do what I want to do by saying no,' the president said. He could then focus on the domestic agenda that he wanted to be the heart of his presidency. The military did not understand. 'Politically, what these guys don't get is it'd be a lot easier for me to go out and give a speech saying, 'You know what? The American people are sick of this war, and we're going to get out of there. ~ Bob Woodward

While I am in favor of the Government promptly enforcing the laws for the present, defending the forts and collecting the revenue,I am not in favor of a war policy with a view to the conquest of any of the slave States; except such as are needed to give us a good boundary. If Maryland attempts to go off, suppress her in order to save the Potomac and the District of Columbia. Cut a piece off of western Virginia and keep Missouri and all the Territories. ~ Rutherford B. Hayes

there's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses--bound for dust--mortal--"
a small boy appeared beside them and, swinging a handful of banana peels, flung them valiantly in the direction of the potomac. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

To your left is the marina where several senior cabinet officials keep luxury
yachts for weekend cruises on the Potomac. Some of these ships are up to 100
feet in length; the Presidential yacht is over 200 feet in length, and can
remain submerged for up to 3 weeks. ~ Garrison Keillor

You were the First Brigade in the Army of the Shenandoah, the First Brigade in the Army of the Potomac, the First Brigade in the Second Corps, and are the First Brigade in the hearts of your generals. I hope that you will be the First Brigade in this, our second struggle for independence, and in the future, on the fields on which the Stonewall Brigade are engaged, I expect to hear of crowning deeds of valor and of victories gloriously achieved! May God bless you all! Farewell! ~ Stonewall Jackson

All quiet along the Potomac. ~ George B. McClellan

All suburban housing developments look alike, and besides, every Yankee who ever crossed the Potomac except Ulysses S. Grant got lost as soon as he reached the Virginia side. ~ Charles McCarry

In a very short time the army of Northern Virginia was face to face with the Army of the Potomac. ~ James Longstreet

Employment in the Small Bookstore"
Twelve Poems, 1975

The dust is almost motionless
in this narrowness, this stillness,
yet how unlike a coffin
it is, sometimes letting a live one in,
sometimes out
and the air,
though paused, impends not a thing,
the silence isn't sinister,
and in fact not much goes on
at the Ariel Book Shop today,
no one weeps in the back
room full of books, old books, no one
is tearing the books to shreds, in fact
I am merely sitting here
talking to no one, no one being here,
and I am blameless,
More,
I am grateful for the job,
I am fond of the books and touch them,
I am grateful that King St. goes down
to the river, and that the rain
is lovely, the afternoon green.
If the soft falling away of the afternoon
is all there is, it is nearly
enough, just
let me hear the beautiful clear voice
of a woman in song passing
toward silence, and then
that will be all for me
at five o'clock
I will walk
down to see the untended
sailing yachts of the Potomac
bobbing hopelessly in another silence,
the small silence that gets to be a long
one when the past stops talking
to you because it is dead,
and still you listen,
hearing just the tiny
agonies of old boats
on a cloudy day, in cloudy water.
Talk to it. Men are talking to it
by Cape Charles, for th ~ Denis Johnson

Roebling rejoined the Army of the Potomac in February 1863 back at Fredericksburg, where he was quartered late one night in an old stone jail, from which he would emerge the following morning with a story that would be told in the family for years and years to come. The place had little or no light, it seems, and Roebling, all alone, groping his way about, discovered an old chest that aroused his curiosity. He lifted the lid and reaching inside, his hand touched a stone-cold face. The lid came back down with a bang. Deciding to investigate no further, he cleared a place on the floor, stretched out, and went to sleep. At daybreak he opened the chest to see what sort of corpse had been keeping him company through the night and found instead a stone statue of George Washington's mother that had been stored away for safekeeping. ~ David McCullough