Quotes & Sayings About Dams

The river is of the earth and it is free. It is rigorously embanked and bound, and yet it is free. To hell with restraint, it says, I have got to be going. It will grind out its dams. It will go over or around them. They will become pieces. — Wendell Berry

At one level it's clear that the dam has broken. There's an inevitable move to use the Internet as a distribution medium and that's not going to stop. — Paul Otellini

The Chinese Communist Party has seen fit to protect most property rights because it recognizes that it has a self-interest in doing so. But the party faces no legal constraints other than its own internal political controls if it decides to violate property rights. Many peasants find their land coveted by municipal authorities and developers who want to turn it into commercial real estate, high-density housing, shopping centers, and the like, or else into public infrastructure like roads, dams, or government offices. There are large incentives for developers to work together with corrupt local officials to illegally take land away from peasants or urban homeowners, and such takings have been perhaps the largest single source of social discontent in contemporary China.33 — Francis Fukuyama

By erecting thirty thousand dams of significant size across the American West, they dewatered countless rivers, wiped out millions of acres of riparian habitat, shut off many thousands of river miles of salmon habitat, silted over spawning beds, poisoned return flows with agricultural chemicals, set the plague of livestock loose on the arid land--in a nutshell they made it close to impossible for numerous native species to survive. — Marc Reisner

When we talk of flood control, we usually think of dams and deeper river channels, to impound the waters or hurry their run-off. Yet neither is the ultimate solution, simply because floods are caused by the flow of water downhill. If the hills are wooded, that flow is checked. If there is a swamp at the foot of the hills, the swamp sponges up most of the excess water, restores some of it to the underground water supply and feeds the remainder slowly into the streams. Strip the hills, drain the boglands, and you create flood conditions inevitably. Yet that is what we have been doing for years. — Hal Borland

Twice ten fat oxen to the ships she sends; Besides a hundred boars, a hundred lambs, With bleating cries, attend their milky dams; And jars of gen'rous wine and spacious bowls She gives, to cheer the sailors' drooping souls. Now purple hangings clothe the palace walls, And sumptuous feasts are made in splendid halls: On Tyrian carpets, richly wrought, they dine; With loads of massy plate the sideboards shine, And antique vases, all of gold embossed (The gold itself inferior to the cost), Of curious work, where on the sides were seen The fights and figures of illustrious men, From their first founder to the present queen. — Virgil

It was a sign of decaying culture, of course, that dams had been built against the further development of ideas. — Isaac Asimov

For everyone, everywhere, literacy is, along with education in general, a basic human right. — Kofi Annan

When dams were erected on the Columbia, salmon battered themselves against the concrete, trying to return home. I expect no less from us. We too must hurl ourselves against and through the literal and metaphorical concrete that contains and constrains us, that keeps us from talking about what is most important to us, that keeps us from living the way our bones know we can, that bars us from our home. It only takes one person to bring down a dam. — Derrick Jensen

If I were a magician who could make things possible, I'd have lemonade always tasting as it did on the evening Francesco explained how right it was for the Italian moon to be a feminine moon. If I were a magician who could make things possible, we'd be able to understand all languages every evening between eight and nine. If I were a magician who could make things possible, all dams would keep their promises. If I were a magician who could make things possible, we'd be really brave. — Sasa Stanisic

She loved sinking into her bed on evenings like this, but apparently she shouldn't, because it worried her aunts, who thought she ought to be out dancing. It worried her a little bit, too, because what if they were right, and because sometimes a great loneliness welled up in her and threatened all the dams she built to hold it back. You couldn't cure loneliness by wallowing in it, up above the world, on an island removed from everything. She knew that. But she had such a hard time with all the cures. They seemed rough and brusque and brutal, as if they abused her skin with a pot scrubber ... forcing herself into a mass of people, a stranger among strangers ... But it was much more tempting to curl up with a book under her thick white comforter.
Still, sometimes after she curled up, she regretted her lack of courage and felt bleakly lonely.
It was important to have a really good book. — Laura Florand

What did the onion juice do? It did what the world and the sorrows of the world could not do: it brought forth a round, human tear. It made them cry. At last they could cry again. To cry properly, without restraint, to cry like mad. The tears flowed and washed everything away. The rain came. The dew. Oskar has a vision of floodgates opening. Of dams bursting in the spring floods. What is the name of that river that overflows every spring and the government does nothing to stop it? — Gunter Grass

There is sadness and evil in the world, yes. There is also goodness and beauty and justice. The one is as real as the other, and we must keep that fact firmly in mind or lose all sense of proportion. — Jeanne M. Dams

But I never get attracted to fans cause the eager beaver could be the collapse of a dam — Drake

Have you ever had a "worst mom ever" day? Take heart, so have we all. Take my friend's advice. Apologize to your children. Ask God for forgiveness. Get over it and stop letting Satan drag you down. Spend time with the Lord getting a new attitude, and He'll help you leave the dams to the beavers! — Lysa TerKeurst

When those who had been evicted went back to where they came from, they found their villages had disappeared under great dams and dusty quarries. Their homes were occupied by hunger-and policemen. The forests were filling up with armed guerrillas. They found that the wars from the edge of India, in Kashmir, Nagaland, Manipur, had migrated to its heart. People returned to live on city streets and pavements, in hovels on dusty construction sites, wondering which corner of this huge country was meant for them. — Arundhati Roy

With irrigation channels and rivers running dry and municipal water storage dams reaching record lows, California's politicians are getting desperate for solutions to a drought that seemingly has no end. — Marc Levine

Who constitutes the nation? Only the elite?Or do the hundreds of millions of poor in India also make up the nation? Are their interests never identified with national interest? Or is there more than one nation? That is the question you often run up against in some of India's poorest areas. Areas where extremely poor people go into destitution making way for firing ranges, jet fighter plants, coal mines, power projects, dams, sanctuaries, prawn and shrimp farms, even poultry farms. If the costs they bear are the 'price' of development, then the rest of the 'nation' is having one endless free lunch. — P.Sainath

The American Society of Civil Engineers said in 2007 that the U.S. had fallen so far behind in maintaining its public infrastructure
roads, bridges, schools, dams
that it would take more than a trillion and half dollars over five years to bring it back up to standard. Instead, these types of expenditures are being cut back. At the same time, public infrastructure around the world is facing unprecedented stress, with hurricanes, cyclones, floods and forest fires all increasing in frequency and intensity. It's easy to imagine a future in which growing numbers of cities have their frail and long-neglected infrastructures knocked out by disasters and then are left to rot, their core services never repaired or rehabilitated. The well-off, meanwhile, will withdraw into gated communities, their needs met by privatized providers. — Naomi Klein

From being a dream, dams have become a very cynical corrupt enterprise; a way of letting governments lay their hands on huge sums of money; a way of centralizing resources; a way of snatching rivers away from the poor and giving them to the rich. And so in a sense they've become monuments to corruption. — Arundhati Roy

You said please," I whispered, smiling when his relief flooded my emotions with the force of a thousand dams breaking. "I'm never going to let you live that down. — Jeaniene Frost

The brief legal emancipation of Jews during the Napoleonic wars released unparalleled economic, professional, and cultural energies. It was though a high dam had suddenly been breached. — Amos Elon

Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age. — Bertrand Russell

We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects. We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam constructions, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of acres of previously settled land. — David Foreman

Development is not about factories, dams and roads. Development is about people. The goal is material, cultural and spiritual fulfilment for the people. The human factor is of supreme value in development. — Rajiv Gandhi

Sometime I'll get around to asking why the English nobility have so blasted many names that a conversation about them is like reading a Russian novel. I have a private suspicion it's done on purpose to confuse foreigners. — Jeanne M. Dams

The sound of water escaping from mill-dams, etc., willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork.those scenes made me a painter and I am grateful. — John Constable

The agent causing the most immediate damage to species in fresh water are dams, great boosters of local economies but unfortunately chief demons of aquatic habitat destruction. Their — Edward O. Wilson

To accommodate the rapid influx of Europeans, entire cities were built on the outskirts of Cairo, far away from the indigenous population. The foreigners quickly took charge of Egypt's principal export of cotton. They built ports, railroads, and dams, all to implement colonial control over the country's economy. With the construction of their crowning achievement, the Suez Canal, Egypt's fate as Britain's most valuable colony was sealed. To pay for these massive — Reza Aslan

He lids squeezed closed. They were the dams to the silver trails of his soul leaking out. — Dan Skinner

The Quaker loves an ample brim, A hat that bows to no salaam; And dear the beaver is to him As if it never made a dam. — Thomas Hood

Self-consciousness, however, does hinder the experience of the present. It is the one instrument that unplugs all the rest. So long as I lose myself in a tree, say, I can scent its leafy breath or estimate its board feet of lumber, I can draw its fruits or boil tea on its branches, and the tree stays tree. But the second I become aware of myself at any of these activities
looking over my own shoulder, as it were
the tree vanishes, uprooted from the spot and flung out of sight as if it had never grown. And time, which had flowed down into the tree bearing new revelations like floating leaves at ever moment, ceases. It dams, stills, stagnates. (Harper Perennial Edition 82) — Annie Dillard

I shall be in Paris in two days. Well, all is finished. The waves of
human mediocrity rise to the sky and they will engulf the refuge whose
dams I open. Ah! courage leaves me, my heart breaks! O Lord, pity the
Christian who doubts, the sceptic who would believe, the convict of
life embarking alone in the night, under a sky no longer illumined by
the consoling beacons of ancient faith. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

An unspoiled river is a very rare thing in this Nation today. Their flow and vitality have been harnessed by dams and too often they have been turned into open sewers by communities and by industries. It makes us all very fearful that all rivers will go this way unless somebody acts now to try to balance our river development. — Lyndon B. Johnson

Dams are built with the intent of a 100-year lifetime - just long enough for societies to become completely dependent on them — Daniel Lenihan

No more dams I'll make for fish,
Nor fetch in firing
At requiring,
Nor scrape tethering, nor wash dishes.
'Ban, 'Ban, Ca--Caliban
Has a new master, get a new man.
Freedom, high-day! High-day! freedom! Freedom,
high-day, freedom!
---Caliban
(Act II, scene 2, lines 178-185) — William Shakespeare

In these cases, the mind knows what it's doing better than the guile, because the mind flows, the guile dams up, that is, the mind stride but the guile limps. And that's no guileless statement, however, and that's no Harvard like, as MIT will measure soon with computers and docks of Martian data. — Jack Kerouac

All dams are ugly, but the Glen Canyon Dam is sinful ugly. — Edward Abbey

Never give up; for even rivers someday wash dams away. — Arthur Golden

Isn't there a flaw in the logic of that phrase - speak truth to power? It assumes that power doesn't know the truth. But power knows the truth just as well, if not better, than the powerless know the truth. Enron knows what it's doing. We don't have to tell it what it's doing. We have to tell other people what Enron is doing. Similarly, the people who are building the dams know what they're doing. The contractors know how much they're stealing. The bureaucrats know how much they're getting in bribes.
Power knows the truth. There isn't any doubt about that. It is really about telling the story. Good fiction is the truest thing that ever there was. Facts are not necessarily the only truths. Facts can be fiddled with by economists and bankers. There are other kinds of truth. It's about telling the story. As a writer, that's the best thing I can do. It's not just about digging up facts. — Arundhati Roy

The thing the ecologically illiterate don't realise about an ecosystem is that it's a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has order, flowing from point to point. If something dams that flow, order collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late. That's why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences. — Frank Herbert

God is a great underground river that no one can dam up and no one can stop. — Meister Eckhart

It doesn't make you bad losing to Rob Van Dam ... it just makes you like everybody else. — Rob Van Dam

Dams have harmed our wildlife and made rivers less useful for recreation. — Stephen Ambrose

The bigger the dam of patience, the worse the flood when the dam breaks. — Austin O'Malley

The eagle may soar; beavers build dams. — Bill Vaughan

I think the world is a series of broken dams and floods, and my cartoons are tiny little lifeboats. — Sherman Alexie

The Pacific Northwest depends on inexpensive renewable energy from our dams. — Cathy McMorris Rodgers

We have an extensive system of highways, ports, locks and dams, and airports. — Jerry Costello

He wondered what kind of blueprint beavers had for creating such a structure-or did they simply start aimlessly weaving stuff together until they had a dam? Did they even think about creating a dam? Maybe dams were simply accidents that resulted from their fooling around, much like the Army Corps of Engineers' accomplishments. — Patrick F. McManus

I don't know why we keep building these fucking dams," Adams said in a surprisingly forceful British whisper. "Not only do they cause environmental and social disasters, they, with very few exceptions, all fail to do what they were supposed to do in the first place. Look at the Amazon, where they've all silted up. What is the reaction to that? They're going to build another eighty of them. It's just balmy. We must have beaver genes or something ... There's just this kind of sensational desire to build dams, and maybe that should be looked at and excised from human nature. Maybe the Human Genome Project can locate the beaver/dam-building gene and cut that out. — Douglas Adams

As a mighty river which when properly harnessed by dams and canals, creates a vast reservoir of water, prevents famine and provides abundant power for industry; so also the mind, when controlled, provides a reservoir of peace and generates abundant energy for the human uplift. — B.K.S. Iyengar

There are hidden contradictions in the minds of people who "love Nature" while deploring the "artificialities" with which "Man has spoiled Nature.'" The obvious contradiction lies in their choice of words, which imply that Man and his artifacts are not part of "Nature" : but beavers and their dams are. — Robert A. Heinlein

The beaver told the rabbit as they stared at the Hoover Dam: No, I didn't build it myself, but it's based on an idea of mine — Charles Hard Townes

For the good of our environment, the good of the economy, and the good of the Nation, I strongly urge support of the upper Mississippi locks and dams project. — Leonard Boswell

The evil of our times, are mines, dams, power plants and hundreds of smart cities. Shadeless roads, widened by cutting down trees; rivers diverted to fill the flush tanks of five-star hotels; hillocks, the abode of tribal gods, laid bare due to mining; marketplaces without sparrows and trees without birds — U.R. Ananthamurthy

I need to use the Dam Bathroom, I need to use the Dam Snack bar, I want a Dam Tee-Shirt. — Rick Riordan

We tiptoed the tops of beaver dams, hopped hummocks, went wading, looked at spring flowers, tried to catcha snake, got lost and found. How fine it was to move at a meandery, child's pace. — David Sobel

The population explosion is an ecological phenomenon of displacement. Unless we solve that ecological problem of displacing people - to build huge dams, to build motorways, to take away what people need in order to survive - we will keep pumping more and more money into population programs. We will have more and more coercive and violent methods through which women's bodies are treated as experimental grounds for new contraceptives. Yet we will not have a solution to the problem of numbers. — Vandana Shiva

What do you consider the most interesting man-made structure in the galaxy?
The dam they are building at the Three Gorges on the Yangtse. Though perhaps '"baffling'" would be a better word. Dams almost never do what they were intended to do, but create devastation beyond belief. And yet we keep on building them, and I can't help but wonder why. I'm convinced that if we go back far enough in the history of the human species, we will find some beaver genes creeping in there somewhere. It's the only explanation that makes sense. — Douglas Adams

Development isn't a collection of things but rather a process that yields things. Not knowing this, governments, their development and aid agencies, the World Bank, and much of the public put faith in a fallacious 'Thing Theory' of development. The Thing Theory supposes that development is the result of possessing things such as factories, dams, schools, tractors, whatever- often bunches of things subsumed under the category of infrastructure.

To suppose that things, per se, are sufficient to produce development creates false expectations and futilities. — Jane Jacobs

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a practical knowledge of the construction of small lakes was part of the equipment of most countrymen. Many of the holes they dug and dams they built still hold water and are now often regarded as 'natural.' They are of immeasurable value in the landscape. — Elisabeth Beazley

I started inventing things, and then I couldn't stop, like beavers, which I know about. People think they cut down trees so they can build dams, but in reality it's because their teeth never stop growing, and if they didn't constantly file them down by cutting through all of those trees, their teeth would start to grow into their own faces, which would kill them. That's how my brain was. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope. It is a tool for daily life in modern society. It is a bulwark against poverty, and a building block of development, an essential complement to investments in roads, dams, clinics and factories. Literacy is a platform for democratization, and a vehicle for the promotion of cultural and national identity. Especially for girls and women, it is an agent of family health and nutrition. For everyone, everywhere, literacy is, along with education in general, a basic human right ... Literacy is, finally, the road to human progress and the means through which every man, woman and child can realize his or her full potential. — Kofi Annan

Not everybody likes the idea of their cities filling up with the poor. A judge in Bombay called slum dwellers pickpockets of urban land. Another said, while ordering the bulldozing of unauthorized colonies, that people who couldn't afford to live in cities shouldn't live in them. When those who had been evicted went back to where they came from, they found their villages had disappeared under great dams and dusty quarries. — Arundhati Roy

Environmental groups are not completely against dams. We approve of appropriate development. — Ma Jun

We depend on our rivers and dams for energy, transportation, irrigation and recreation and I will continue this year to fight for what's best for the Pacific Northwest. — Cathy McMorris Rodgers

When producing low-heat Portland cement the percentage of C2S is increased and that of C3S and C3A is decreased. This type of cement is of particular use in construction of dams, massive foundation, etc. to reduce the production of heat. — P.C. Varghese

The flood of photos sweeps away the dams of memory. Never before has a period known so little about itself. In the hands of the ruling society, the invention of illustrated magazines is one of the most powerful means of organizing a strike against understanding ... The 'image-idea' drives away the idea. — Siegfried Kracauer

Even though this generation still believes in the miracle working power of God, they must no longer wait for God to bring water from the rocks, but rather construct dams, develop water systems, subdue the power of the ocean and thereby give glory to God almighty. — Sunday Adelaja

Poor Eric came home to see his brother, only to find (Zap!Pow!Dams burst!Bombs go off!Wasps fry:ttssss!) he's got a sister. — Iain Banks

Dams are the temples of secular India and almost worshipped. They are huge, wet cement flags that wave in our minds. They're the symbol of nationalism to many. — Arundhati Roy

...erosion control in Japan is like a game of chess. The forest
engineer, after studying his eroding valley, makes his first move, locating and building
one or more check dams. He waits to see what Nature's response is. This determines the
forest engineer's next move, which may be another dam or two, an increase in the former
dam, or the construction of side retaining walls. After another pause for observation, the
next move is made and so on until erosion is checkmated." (An Agricultural Testament) — Albert Howard

Words, like tranquil waters behind a dam, can become reckless and uncontrollable torrents of destruction when released without caution and wisdom. — William Arthur Ward

In California, there are huge problems because of dams. I'm against big dams, per se, because I think that they are economically unfeasible. They're ecologically unsustainable. And they're hugely undemocratic. — Arundhati Roy

In 1975, the collapse of a cascade of Chinese dams during a flood killed a hundred and seventy-one thousand people, but the event is rarely discussed, and the names of the victims are largely unrecorded today. — Evan Osnos

The majority of the people of the world today are unsane, not insane, unsane meaning having been exposed to methods of evaluation that have long rendered obsolete, our language in the future will change to a saner language where we have no argument in it, 'can there be such a language?' there is, when engineers talk to each other, it's not subject to interpretation, they use math, they use descriptive systems, if I interpreted what another engineer said in the way I think he meant it: you couldn't build bridges, dams, power transmission lines. The language has to have meaning — Jacque Fresco

The number of people displaced by dams is estimated at between 40 million and 80 million, most of them in China and India. The costs of dams were on average 50% above their original estimate. Some designed to reduce flooding made it worse, and there were many unexpected environmental disadvantages, including the extinction of fish and bird species. Half the world's wetlands had been lost because of dams. — Paul Brown

But the sound of water escaping from mill-dams, &c., willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork, I love such things. Shakespeare could make everything poetical; he tells us of poor Tom's haunts among "sheep cotes and mills." As long as I do paint, I shall never cease to paint such places. They have always been my delight. — John Constable

Elizabeth nodded, looking too dejected to do much more. "Can she just go back to him?" she pleaded. "He's dying. She's dying. They can't have a life together, but at least they could have this."
No, Kahlen is Mine. We'll fix her.
"With what?" Elizabeth demanded through tears. "There's nothing left."
"Please," I said, letting all the dams burst, exposing every last drop of love I had for Akinli. "You've seen how I feel now. I've shared everything . . . — Kiera Cass

The great monuments are raised up like dams, pitting the logic of majesty and authority against all the shady elements: it is in the form of cathedrals and palaces that Church and State speak and impose silence on the multitudes. — Georges Bataille

[A] pile driver was improvised by mounting a large steam donkey engine, a steam hammer, and a timber tower on a barge. — Ray Bottenberg

History does seem to be just one long succession of murders, doesn't it? — Jeanne M. Dams

And this is what mere humanity always does. It's made up of these inventors or artists, millions and millions of them, each in his own way trying to recruit other people to play a supporting role and sustain him in his make-believe. The great chiefs and leaders recruit the greatest number, and that's what their power is. There's one image that gets out in front to lead the rest and can impose its claim to being genuine with more force than others, or one voice enlarged to thunder is heard above the others. Then a huge invention, which is the invention maybe of the world itself, and of nature, becomes the actual world - with cities, factories, public buildings, railroads, armies, dams, prisons, and movies - becomes the actuality. That's the struggle of humanity, to recruit others to your version of what's real. Then even the flowers and the moss on the stones become the moss and the flowers of a version. — Saul Bellow

Does anyone beside me experience a deep sorrow that someone called a "Hero for the Planet" and a "star of the sustainability movement" is designing truck factories and Nike headquarters? Ninety percent of the large fish in the ocean are gone. Ninety-seven percent of the world's native forests have been cut. There are 2 million dams just in the United States. Once-mighty flocks of passenger pigeons are gone. Islands full of great aucks, gone. Rich runs of salmon, gone. Gone. Gone. Gone. The oceans are filled with plastic. Every stream in the United States is contaminated with carcinogens. The world is being killed, and this is the respond? Not only am I angry, not only am I disgusted, I am also deeply, deeply sorrowful.
And I am deeply ashamed.
We need to act differently. — Derrick Jensen

Funny, there had been a time when building things was what America did. From massive dams to towering skyscrapers, from mechanized factories to moon rockets, the nation had created, had viewed that as part of the national identity. — Marcus Sakey

A forest is a living thing like a human body ... each part dependent on all the other parts. A forest needs its birds, its beaver ... all its animals and plants. The forest gives shelter to the birds, but they repay the debt with the insects they eat, the droppings they leave, the seeds they carry off to plant elsewhere. The beaver builds dams for himself, but the dams keep water on the land, and although the beaver cut trees to use and to eat, their ponds provide water for the trees during the hot, dry months ... Listen, and you can hear the forest breath. — Louis L'Amour

Stops at the end of the road collected Clyde Lidgards like dams collected silt. — C.J. Box

No man-made structure in all of American history has been hated so much, by so many, for so long, with such good reason, as that Glen Canyon Dam at Page, Arizona, Shithead Capital of Coconino County. — Edward Abbey

When a parent interferes with a child's anger response in these heavy-handed ways [ridiculing, ignoring, isolating, goading, punishing, distracting, hitting, joking], the anger increases and is redirected at the parent: now the parent is the one who's violating the child's sense of well-being by interfering with a natural and necessary outlet of emotion. Most parents stifle this secondary outburst of anger, too, only this time with more force. [...] Instead of allowing the anger to flow through the child's system the first time it's expressed, the parent unwittingly fans the anger, then dams it up. The anger becomes trapped in the little girl's stomach, muscles, and jaw, and becomes an enduring wound. — Patricia Love

Most of the locks and dams on the upper Mississippi River system are over 60 years old and many are in serious need of repair and rehabilitation. — Ron Kind

Human civilization has been changing the Earth's environment for millennia, often to our detriment. Dams, deforestation and urbanization can alter water cycles and wind patterns, occasionally triggering droughts or even creating deserts. — Jamais Cascio

As technological civilization diminishes the biotic diversity of the earth, language itself is diminished. As there are fewer and fewer songbirds in the air, due to the destruction of their forests and wetlands, human speech loses more and more of its evocative power. For when we no longer hear the voices of warbler and wren, our own speaking can no longer be nourished by their cadences. As the splashing speech of the rivers is silenced by more and more dams, as we drive more and more of the land's wild voices into the oblivion of extinction, our own languages become increasingly impoverished and weightless, progressively emptied of their earthly resonance.17 — David Abram

There are certain things that Americans expect their government to do. Our infrastructure is vitally important. Putting people back to work with construction is important. Our roads, our bridges, our sewers, our waterways, our dams - this is what makes our country so special. — Valerie Jarrett

My mother had a philosophy that guided her through many a rough time. 'Only worry when you can do something about it--whatever it is. Then it's not worry, it's thinking things through, trying to decide what's best. When there's nothing you can do, it's just plain worry, and it's pointless and self-destructive. — Jeanne M. Dams