Quotes & Sayings About Levees

O, nothing is more alluring than a levee from a couch in some confusion. — William Congreve

There are so many angles to follow up: government incompetence, sophisticated charity scams, how insurance companies treat victims, construction of the levees, who will start ripping off the billions of dollars available in new contracts. Every single one of these stories is going to be a big one. — Brian Ross

Save the stonewall to build the levees. — Lloyd Doggett

Loving relatives and home-cooked meals are solid levees against a recession. — Rosecrans Baldwin

Disasters happen. We still have no way to eliminate earthquakes, wildfires, hurricanes, floods or droughts. We cope as best we can by fortifying ourselves against danger with building codes and levees, and by setting aside money to clean up afterwards. — Seth Shostak

Death and loss, they plague you. So do memories. Like the Mississippi's incessant slap against the levees, they creep up with deceptive sweetness before grabbing your heart and pulling it under. — Karen White

I do believe that General Washington had not a firm confidence in the durability of our government. He was naturally distrustful of men, and inclined to gloomy apprehensions; and I was ever persuaded that a belief that we must at length end in something like a British constitution, had some weight in his adoption of the ceremonies of levees, birthdays, pompous meetings with Congress, and other forms of the same character, calculated to prepare us gradually for a change which he believed possible, and to let it come on with as little shock as might be to the public mind. — Thomas Jefferson

Soon levees up and down the river were popping like buttons off a tight shirt. At Mounds Landing, Mississippi, a hundred black workers, kept at their posts by men with rifles, were swept to oblivion when a levee gave way. The coroner, for reasons unstated, recorded just two deaths. — Bill Bryson

I don't know. Maybe we're all chaos theorists. Lovers of pattern and predictability, we're scared shitless of explosive change. But we're fascinated by it, too. Drawn to it. Travelers tap their brakes to ogle the mutilation and mangled metal on the side of the interstate, and the traffic backs up for miles. Hijacked planes crash into skyscrapers, breached levees drown a city, and CNN and the networks rush to the scene so that we can all sit in front of our TVs and feast on the footage. Stare, stunned, at the pandemonium
the devils let loose from their cages. — Wally Lamb

The federal government was responsible for building the levees, engineering the levees, and consequentially, the federal government is responsible for repairing the damage that has been done, which has not been completed yet. — Mitch Landrieu

And if citizens of New Orleans who are really contemplating coming back heard that we're really intent upon making the place secure again - regardless of whether the levees held or not - then I think a rebuilding process would really take shape. — Billy Tauzin

The queen who mended her stockings in prison must have looked every inch a queen and even more a queen than at sumptuous banquets and levees. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In a city once ravaged by storms, where the destitute victimized by ferocious wind and rain and by the collapse of levees - which were inadequately engineered and no warning was given that they might not hold - and where the only crime attributed to those people was that they were too poor to flee and were consequently fired upon and two of them shot dead - not by looters, not by warring gangs, not by manic throngs of frightened or disoriented people like themselves, but by the very men charged to protect them - — John Farrow

U.S. military spending, which consumes half of all discretionary spending, has had a profound social and political cost. Bridges and levees collapse. Schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. Trillions in debt threaten the viability of the currency and the economy. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick, and the unemployed are abandoned. Human suffering is the price for victory, which is never finally defined or attainable. — Chris Hedges

I needed to explain that Louisiana's coast accepts the drainage from two-thirds of the United States and, while the necessary levees constructed upstream have prevented floods, they have also contributed to problems downstream. — John Breaux

Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed levees and exploded the conventional wisdom about a shared American prosperity, exposing a group of people so poor they didn't have $50 for a bus ticket out of town. If we want to learn something from this disaster, the lesson ought to be: America's poor deserve better than this. — Michael Eric Dyson

We relied on the slave labor of African peoples to build the levees that protected our homes and farmland, to harvest and cook our food, to care for our children, to chop, and hoe, and sweat, and sew, and nurse us back to health, while we aspired to be persons of leisure, or at least to leave the really brutal work to them. — Tim Wise

Al Gore has a hit movie called 'An Inconvenient Truth.' I have an inconvenient truth for him: you're still not the president ... This past weekend, Al Gore's movie, 'An Inconvenient Truth,' earned more per screen than any film in the country ... I dare say Gore's movie is the highest grossing PowerPoint presentation in history ... Global warming: Can we live with it? ... It is time we did something, namely resign ourselves to doing nothing [on screen: Follow Congress' Lead] ... For instance, when sea levels rise, we'll just build levees [on screen: Worked for New Orleans] — Stephen Colbert

Like some great swelling river, the powers of the federal government have today breached their constitutional levees and spilled into countless areas of life never anticipated by the founders. — Joel Miller

Today's water arguments reflect a growing unease about how to proceed when old certainties are being pushed aside and new options seem limited or unappealing. But the stark warnings implicit in Wisconsin's poisoned wells, the intersex and dying fish of Chesapeake Bay, Lake Mead's recored-low waterline, the decay of levees across the country, and the resource war in Alaska's Bristol Bay, cannot be ignored. — Alex Prud'Homme

Granny turned slowly in her seat to look at the audience. They were staring at the performance, their faces rapt. The words washed over them in the breathless air. This was real. This was more real even than reality. This was history. It might not be true, but that had nothing to do with it.
Granny had never had much time for words. They were so insubstantial. Now she wished that she had found the time. Words were indeed insubstantial. They were as soft as water, but they were also as powerful as water and now they were rushing over the audience, eroding the levees of veracity, and carrying away the past. — Terry Pratchett

Unless engineers can stop southern Louisiana from sinking into the Gulf - the Mississippi Delta is the fastest-disappearing land on the planet - even post-Katrina's modernized levees will be overwhelmed. — Nina Easton

It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break; the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate. — Barack Obama

Down an alley a washing woman has set out laundry in pans near the rubble of an old high-rise. Another is washing her body, carefully scrubbing under her sarong, its fabric clinging to her skin. Children run naked through the dirt, jumping over bits of broken concrete that were laid down more than a hundred years ago in the old Expansion. Far down the street the levees rise, holding back the sea. — Paolo Bacigalupi