Ron Wyden Quotes

There's no getting away from it: you have to clean.

You can have the power to destroy, but it doesn't give you the power to reform, or improve, or build.

There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.

The place needs a complete overhaul.

Never underestimate the power of a fresh coat of white paint.

A little renovation and reinvention is a positive thing.

Do not dismantle the house, but look at each brick, and replace those which appear to be broken, which no longer support the structure.

The most important piece in the house is the garbage can.

We're going to put sanity back into the White House.

What matters most is not who is sitting in the White House, but "who is sitting in" - and who is marching outside the White House, pushing for change.

No one regrets having changed a lightbulb.

Turn over a new leaf.

Sometimes you've got to make a mess before you clean it up.

Change does not necessarily assure progress, but progress implacably requires change.

Leaders make things better and that requires change.

What's wrong with the world and what can we do to change it?

I would love to take an old space and restore it to exactly the way I want it. Like an old factory, just something with great bones and lots of character. I'd take an old house and flip it into something very modern inside, or the other way around.

Can we have a conversation about the substance? That's what I welcome. We're happy to have those conversations if there are places where people think there can be improvements. We want competition in the system, so let's talk about that.

I don't think there will ever be a time when people will stop wanting to bring about change.

I pledge you, pledge myself, to a New Deal for the American people. Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage. This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.

There's a lot of things that need to change, a lot of different issues that need to be addressed.

Resistance to improvement contradicts the noblest instincts of the race. It begets its opposite. The fanaticism of reform is only the raging of the accumulated waters caused by the obstructions which an ultra conservatism has thrown across the stream of progress; and revolution itself is but the sudden overwhelming and sweeping away of impediments that should have been seasonably removed.

Cut out doors and windows for the house. The holes make it useful.

It's just because I love the past that I want this house to look back on its glamourous moment of youth and beauty, and I want its stairs to creak as if to the footsteps of women with hoop skirts and men in boots and spurs. But they've made it into a blondined, rouged-up old woman of sixty.

There is a way to be good again.