Top 100 Sarah Vowell Quotes

#1. When Lafayette met him in 1775, the first volume of Raynal's 1770 History of the Two Indies had already been banned, which is to say it was a popular success, the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books being the unofficial bestseller list of the day.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #2600
#2. Freedom of the press, the surest guaranty of the rights of man.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #4736
#3. His pictures of this region summarize the soulful emptiness of a country where, as Gertrude Stein observed, 'there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #35753
#4. No one I know actually reads what I write, so thank heavens for you strangers.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #39236
#5. Oh my dear, idealists are the cruelest monsters of them all.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #39757
#6. I'm a big fan of editing and keeping only the interesting bits in.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #56679
#7. I no longer drink nearly as much as I used to but, still, my motto is Sine coffea nihil sum. Without coffee, I'm nothing.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #90682
#8. I hated the lost colony; in second grade, we were doing American History, and they said, We don't know what happened to them. That drove me nuts. That lost colony drove me crazy.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #116957
#9. The whole thing reminds me of graduate school seminars, except these people are smart and funny and have something interesting to say.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #145584
#10. I have a policy about that word "soul." It is strictly prohibited except in cases of converstations having to do with okra recipes or Marvin Gaye.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #149420
#11. Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #167510
#12. We the people have never agreed on much of anything. ... [D]isunity is the through-line in the national plot. Not necessarily as a failing, but as a free people's privileged.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #187676
#13. I have watched enough science fiction films to accept that humanity's unchecked pursuit of learning will end with robots taking over the world.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #206248
#14. One of the French officers was horrified that at a dinner in Washington's tent, His Excellency served the meal not in a succession of courses like in civilization. Apparently Washington "gave, on the same plate, meat, vegetables, and salad." On the same plate? Were these Americans people or animals?

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #307428
#15. Lafayette, on the other hand, was more of a make-your-own-destiny type of fellow, disobeying orders from the king and abandoning a pregnant girl for an entirely optional adventure.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #316883
#16. Americans' fatal tendency of disunion.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #328575
#17. I like that the Mall serves as our national Tuppaware, reliable and empty, waiting to be filled with potluck whatever.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #339288
#18. You know your country has a checkered past when you find yourself sitting around pondering the humanitarian upside of sticking with the British Empire.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #344236
#19. Except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #434982
#20. It requires all my philosophy, and all my piety' to make peace ...

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #464634
#21. In other words, the most ardent republicans since the fall of Rome were asking their king to help them prevail over the representative legislature of the world's oldest constitutional monarchy, the great symbol and protector of British freedom. From

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #513662
#22. There's nothing more depressing than bad capitalism.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #532506
#23. In death, you get upgraded into a saint no matter how much people hated you in life.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #534662
#24. Steuben explained to his friend, "You say to your soldier, 'Do this,' and he does it; but I am obliged to say, 'This is the reason why you ought to do that,' and then he does it.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #548161
#25. You know you've reached a new plateau of group mediocrity when even a Canadian is alarmed by your lack of individuality.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #586869
#26. Dig deep into its communitarian ethos and it reads more like an America that might have been, an America fervently devoted to the quaint goals of working together and getting along. Of course, this America does exist. It's called Canada.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #588852
#27. That's what I like to call him, "the current president." I find it difficult to say or type his name, George W. Bush. I like to call him "the current president" because it's a hopeful phrase, implying that his administration is only temporary.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #592034
#28. With only sixty men to hold off four hundred Americans, the British commander of the redoubt, a Major Campbell, surrendered to Laurens. Afterward, when an unhinged captain from New Hampshire threatened Campbell with his bayonet, Hamilton stepped between them, because rules were rules.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #598504
#29. So I say to you read! Read! Something will stick in the mind, be diligent and good will come of it.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #606735
#30. You think this is a mess? New York is a mess! Why should it matter if I spill anything inside? The whole city is a dump! I'm not pretending the inside is any different from the outside anymore!

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #618712
#31. Then Cotton quotes Luke 12:48. "To whom much is given, of him God will require the more." Of course there's a catch, Spider-Man. When God is the landlord, Cotton says, "defraud him not of his rent." The price? Obedience.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #623053
#32. Like Lincoln, I would like to believe the ballot is stronger than the bullet. Then again, he said that before he got shot.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #656295
#33. I do not think that there can ever be enough books about anything; and I say that knowing that some of them are going to be about Pilates.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #688209
#34. The medieval pilgrimage routes, in which Christians walked from church to church to commune with the innards of saints, are the beginnings of the modern tourism industry.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #693578
#35. Acts 16:9 is the meddler's motto, simultaneously selfless and self-serving, generous but stuck-up. Into every generation of Americans is born a new crop of buttinskys sniffing out the latest Macedonia that may or may not want their help.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #706391
#36. Owen is the most Hitchcockian preschooler I ever met. He's three. He knows maybe ninety word and one of them is 'crypt'?

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #711876
#37. On the illusive "Monsieur Hortalez." When my friend Steven and I went looking for the building one afternoon, we came to the address at 47 rue Vieille-du-Temple and realized we had been there before.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #717646
#38. American history is a quagmire, and the more one knows, the quaggier the mire gets.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #755299
#39. Never have I enjoyed such swearing, before or since. Sir, on that memorable day, he swore like an angel from Heaven.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #768961
#40. So, the moral of that story, other than never underestimate an independent bookseller, was that the Continental Army and its commander in chief had a soft spot for Chief Artillery Officer Henry Knox.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #794494
#41. While history might be full of exemplary fathers, recorded history is not where to find them.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #831860
#42. The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #842700
#43. Clemenza's overriding responsibility is to his family. He takes a moment out of his routine madness to remember that he had promised his wife that he would bring dessert home. His instruction to his partner in crime is an entire moral manifesto in six little words: 'Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #847807
#44. Hamilton, aware the war was winding down and that this was likely his last shot at glory, went over Lafayette's head and appealed to Washington, who overruled Lafayette and allowed Hamilton to lead.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #860680
#45. I didn't come from any kind of academic background, but I lived in a college town and I knew people who weren't without pretense. There was this idea in the town that if something was European it would be good.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #870550
#46. The only people who know about me are people who would know about me.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #873523
#47. With temperatures dropping, how could men without shirts expect to fend off opponents so blatantly well equipped with outerwear that they were nicknamed the redcoats?

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #874395
#48. Lafayette lifted his glass at one reception to toast 'the perpetual union of the United States,' adding, 'it has always saved us in time of storm; one day it will save the world.'" Whether

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #880331
#49. Don't bring up McKinley. Don't bring up McKinley.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #895229
#50. Let us thank God for having given us such ancestors; and let each successive generation thank Him, not less fervently, for being one step further from them in the march of ages.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #933555
#51. But when I am around strangers, I turn into a conversational Mount St. Helens. I'm dormant, dormant, quiet, quiet, old-guy loners build log cabins on the slopes of my silence and then, boom, it's 1980. Once I erupt, they'll be wiping my verbal ashes off their windshields as far away as North Dakota.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #945629
#52. The victory at Trenton boosted morale among the troops, the Congress, and the people to a degree possibly unwarranted by winning back a town in New Jersey, what with it being a town in New Jersey.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #958637
#53. Relics are treasured as something close to the divine.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #968371
#54. Why is America the last best hope of Earth? What if it's Liechtenstein? Or, worse, Canada?

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1066422
#55. One night last summer, all the killers in my head assembled on a stage in Massachusetts to sing show tunes.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1098928
#56. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, Robert Lincoln bought a nice ski lodge.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1157336
#57. He spent part of last year working in Canada, and I think it rubbed off on him, diminishing his innate American ability to celebrate the civic virtue of idiocy.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1171718
#58. That story is proof of the theorem that then as today in Chicago, the mysterious equation of whiskey plus music equals what can only be called happiness.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1183864
#59. If I looked in the mirror someday and saw no dark circles under my eyes, I would probably look better. I just wouldn't look like me.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1191249
#60. Freedom of expression truly exists only when a society's most repugnant nitwits are allowed to spew their nonsense in public.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1193548
#61. You know, it's always good to have a synonym just for variety.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1204708
#62. Did not hesitate to be disagreeable to preserve my independence - applied

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1225597
#63. Devoted to principles of liberty, equality, and religious tolerance
which, dear internet, is not necessarily the same thing as satanism
Masonic lodge became the de facto clubhouses of the Age of Reason.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1230863
#64. At a Clinton press conference, I'm given the luxury of daydreaming, of being comfortable enough that he could find Peru on a map, say, that I don't have to hang on his every word, praying he won't fuck up.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1234597
#65. I resist the urge to raise my hand and utter the four most reassuring words in the English language: I know a guy.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1235207
#66. Still, compared to him, compared to the people we descend from, I am free of history. I'm so free of history I have to get in a car and drive seven states to find it.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1253372
#67. No one recorded what those marches were, though decades later there was an apocryphal and later-debunked story the one of the songs the British played was the on-the-nose The World Turned Upside Down.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1259650
#68. Listening to the radio every day for an entire year was a prison sentence. It was the most depressing, annoying, debilitating project I have ever undertaken, and I have a master's degree in art history.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1261109
#69. There is something aesthetically pleasing about trading one engraving - and old map - for another - American money.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1288759
#70. When one of a culture's guiding credos is that "all men are created equal," any person who, say, becomes an expert on, say, nuclear weapons or, say, ecology, i.e., anyone who distinguishes himself through mental excellence, is a nuisance.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1312821
#71. My ideal picture of citizenship will always be an argument, not a sing-along.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1314621
#72.
a man without birth, without courage, without conduct. For my part, I declare, sir, it shall never be said that I made such a man my master.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1384906
#73. I seem to have no problem revealing my crush on the man who murdered Lincoln.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1400229
#74. I discovered that Robert Todd Lincoln was there for each of the first three assassinations. I wanted to write about the Lincoln Memorial, so when I found out he had attended its dedication, that helped focus it further.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1403947
#75. Robert Todd Lincoln, a.k.a. Jinxy McDeath.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1414702
#76. After Hymns and tears, they boarded the brig Thaddeus, a vessel so crappy, it made the Mayflower look like the QE2.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1424821
#77. I was a big Nancy Drew reader. Nancy figures it out. Case closed.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1436124
#78. The whole point of Louis Armstrong is that no one can really figure him out. There was a while where I thought you could try.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1456377
#79. I suspect that the day a person gives up on the Geneva Convention is the day a person gives up on the human race.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1476685
#80. The one time I was an actor, it happened to be in a globally dominant juggernaut. That was lucky.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1478404
#81. A humble, bootstrappy patriot, Knox wooed, then married Lucy Flucker, the highbrow daughter of the Loyalist governor of the province of Massachusetts.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1511184
#82. I don't know how to describe the magnificence of Carlsbad Caverns without making it sound like a cartoon or a drug trip or a cartoon of a drug trip. The only thing I can say is that it is one of those dear places that make you love the world.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1547787
#83. My audience is going to die before I do.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1552192
#84. We go in to liberate Cuba, but Cuba still isn't free; we don't really think through what we'll do after the initial treaty is signed, but we're still occupying. There's chaos and torture and finally an outcry.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1558725
#85. Take for example the commencement address he [James Garfield] delivered at his alma mater Hiram College in the summer of 1880 ... The only thing stopping this address from turning into a slacker parable is the absence of the word 'dude'.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1593248
#86. Like a lot of once devout people who have lost their faith, I had holes the size of heaven and hell in my head and in my heart.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1615140
#87. The irony of informing nearly naked people in a wilderness setting about the story of naked Adam and Eve eating the fruit of knowledge and inventing the fashion industry due to a sudden need for clothing to hide their shame is not lost on Williams.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1623246
#88. Being a nerd, which is to say going to far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know. For me, the spark that turns an acquaintance into a friend has usually been kindled by some shared enthusiasm like detective novels or Ulysses S. Grant.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1626096
#89. Winthrop and his shipmates and their children and their children's children just wrote their own books and pretty much kept their noses in them up until the day God created the Red Sox.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1642049
#90. Quoting Kipling, I never got over the wonder of a people who, having extirpated the aboriginals of their continent more completely than any modern race had ever done, honestly believed they were a godly little New England community, setting examples to mankind.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1665580
#91. A couple of times he called the second he'd finished reading a novel and just had to tell me about it, and I know it sounds hokey and librarianish to say so, but I just swooned when he did that.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1668483
#92. Not that I want the current president killed. I will, for the record and for the FBI agent assigned to read this and make sure I mean no harm, clearly state that while I am obsessed with death, I am against it.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1671161
#93. Um," I asked, "isn't the whole point about being a slave that you don't have a choice to be anything else?" Prettying up the word slave with the adjective-noun constructions makes "enslaved African" sound nonchalant. As in "Those were the cabins of the jolly leprechauns.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1684832
#94. If Americans can transform Memorial Day, technically a remembrance of all our war dead ever, into the official kickoff of summer, we can handle adapting one demoralizing battle into a wholesome, chipper get-together.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1711717
#95. Jeff Davis's name they'll proudly praise, ah ha, ah ha And Lincoln's tomb will be disgraced, ah ha, ah ha The nation's flag will lose its stars The stripes they'll change to rebel bars And we'll all wear gray if the Johnnies get into power

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1738819
#96. My lips are chapped from the winds of change.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1749944
#97. For years they've grumbled that England is a cesspool governed by an immoral king under the spell of the Whore of Babylon, which is their cute nickname for the pope.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1757851
#98. Radio is the playground of coincidence.

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1796000
#99. But there's still this combination of governmental ineptitude, shortsightedness, stinginess, corruption, and neglect that affected the Continentals before, during, and after Valley Forge that twenty-first-century Americans are not entirely unfamiliar with. While

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1802982
#100. The doo-wop stalker love song on a Cincinnati oldies station
you broke up with me because I was an obnoxious jerk and now you're dating him, so I drive by your house and stare in your window every night, thereby proving that I'm an even bigger creep than you thought

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes #1803325

Famous Authors

Popular Topics

Scroll to Top