It has been notoriously difficult to construct a meta-stable de Sitter (dS) vacuum in string theory in a controlled approximation. This suggests the possibility that meta-stable dS belongs to the swampland. In this paper, we propose a swampland criterion in the form of $| abla V|geq c cdot V$ for a scalar potential $V$ of any consistent theory of quantum gravity, for a positive constant $c$. In particular, this bound forbids dS vacua. The existence of this bound is motivated by the abundance of string theory constructions and no-go theorems which exhibit this behavior. We also extend some of the well-known no-go theorems for the existence of dS vacua in string theory to more general accelerating universes and reinterpret the results in terms of restrictions on allowed scalar potentials.
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