Top 160 Sarah Vowell Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Jesus and Lincoln, Moses and Jefferson can seem so long gone, so unbelievable, so dead.”

— Sarah Vowell

52. “Why is America the last best hope of Earth? What if it’s Liechtenstein? Or, worse, Canada?”

— Sarah Vowell

53. “I still believe in public radio’s potential. Because it’s the one mass medium that’s still crafted almost entirely by true believers.”

— Sarah Vowell

54. “Radio is the playground of coincidence.”

— Sarah Vowell

55. “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

56. “Everyone says that love requires the utmost honesty, but that’s not entirely true. Once I knew that my father was suffering for my sake – really suffering – I learned that love, especially the parental kind, requires the heartwarming sacrifice that can only accompany fake enthusiasm.”

— Sarah Vowell

57. “The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Civil War-when I really think about them they all seem about as likely as the parting of the Red Sea.”

— Sarah Vowell

58. “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

59. “Considering Independence Hall was also where the founders calculated that a slave equals three-fifths of a person and cooked up an electoral college that lets Florida and Ohio pick our presidents, making an adolescent who barely spoke English a major general at the age I got hired to run the cash register at a Portland pizza joint was not the worst decision ever made there.”

— Sarah Vowell

60. “After he finishes his song, I ask him, “Sir, were you just playing ‘Lean on Me’?” “That’s right!” he answers, thrilled. Now, whenever I think of Mudd and his house I hear that song, hear Mudd serenading the limping Booth, taking his arm and helping him up the stairs, singing, “Lean on me, when you’re not strong, and I’ll be your friend.”

— Sarah Vowell

61. “Oh, if only that was the last time in America that the extreme left and extreme right broke down and made a mess of things, leaving everyone in the center to suffer.”

— Sarah Vowell

62. “The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief.”

— Sarah Vowell

63. “Experience is terribly important. You’ll notice that the congressmen who want to hold up the government are all junior people and new to the game. And of course they will say, ‘Oh, it’s Washington cynicism, where they all compromise and work out backroom deals.’ But that’s actually how democracy works.” Which.”

— Sarah Vowell

64. “By journey’s end the brides were much better acquainted with their grooms and more or less pleased with the matches. Sybil Bingham wrote in her diary, thanking God for answering her prayer for filling “the void” with a husband like Hiram, a “treasure rich and undeserved.” Having read his insufferable memoir, “A Residence of Twenty-one Years in the Sandwich Islands”, all I can say is: I’m happy for her?”

— Sarah Vowell

65. “I’m a big fan of editing and keeping only the interesting bits in.”

— Sarah Vowell

66. “One night last summer, all the killers in my head assembled on a stage in Massachusetts to sing show tunes.”

— Sarah Vowell

67. “In other words, after Winthrop has acquired all his butter firkins, food stirrers, and beer along with six dozen candles, twenty thousand biscuits, and twenty-nine sides of beef, he goes through the Bible and writes down a bunch of verses commanding him to be willing to cheerfully give all that stuff away. My firkin is your firkin being one of Christianity’s primary creeds.”

— Sarah Vowell

68. “In other words, ideas, when implemented, turn into precedents with unpredictable and potentially disturbing consequences. As the British historian and politician Lord Acton described the effect that our Revolutionary War had on our French allies, “What the French took from the Americans was their theory of revolution, not their theory of government – their cutting, not their sewing.”

— Sarah Vowell

69. “After Hiram Bingham built the first church on Oahu the student recalls, “When it was completed some of the natives said among themselves, ‘That house of worship built by the haoles is a place in which they will pray us all to death. It is meant to kill us.”

— Sarah Vowell

70. “There are freaky talking mannequins in the Salem Witch Museum that recite the Lord’s Prayer and while they do resemble shrunken apples they nevertheless help the visitor understand how hard it must have been for the condemned to say the line about forgiving those who trespass against us.”

— Sarah Vowell

71. “You know you’ve reached a new plateau of group mediocrity when even a Canadian is alarmed by your lack of individuality.”

— Sarah Vowell

72. “Presidents and presidential assassins are like Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. Even though one city is all about sin and the other is all about salvation, they are identical, one-dimensional company towns built up by the sheer will of true believers.”

— Sarah Vowell

73. “If two of the most distinguished, dedicated, and thoughtful public servants in the history of this republic could not find a way to agree to disagree, how can we expect the current crop of congressional blockheads to get along?”

— Sarah Vowell

74. “I haven’t decided if he deserved to eat bread made out of sticks or live in a rancid puddle, probably because I haven’t made up my mind whether anyone deserves such treatment, though I suspect that the day a person gives up on the Geneva Conventions is the day a person gives up on the human race.”

— Sarah Vowell

75. “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

76. “French was assigned to sculpt allegorical figures of the continents. His America, from 1907, is one of the most concise depictions of our history I’ve ever seen: a European stepping on a Mayan head.”

— Sarah Vowell

77. “The scene of Washington cussing out Charles Lee was for some reason not included in the series of bronze illustrations of the Battle of Monmouth on the monument at the county courthouse. Even though it was the most New Jersey–like behavior in the battle, if not the entire war.”

— Sarah Vowell

78. “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

79. “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

80. “That’s what we Americans do when we find a place that’s really special. We go there and act exactly like ourselves. And we are a bunch of fun-loving dopes.”

— Sarah Vowell

81. “Not until Theodore Roosevelt resigned his prestigious position as assistant secretary of the navy in 1898 to fight with the Rough Riders in the Cuban dirt would there be a rich man as weirdly rabid to join American forces in combat as Lafayette was. The two shared a child’s ideal of manly military glory. Though in Lafayette’s defense, he was an actual teenager, unlike the thirty-nine-year-old TR.”

— Sarah Vowell

82. “To me, the highlight of the event is watching a reenactor in a long striped dress sitting alone on a blanket, winding yarn. Absorbed in the task of wrapping strands of wool around her hand, she never looks up. Watching her is so mesmerizing and oddly sacred that it never occurs to me to interrupt her and ask her name or how she got into the yarn-winding reenactment biz, maybe because she isn’t recreating; she is creating.”

— Sarah Vowell

83. “The fact that a child that age was allowed to go out looking for the four-legged serial killer that the king has dispatched his personal gun-bearer to track down speaks of an older, hands-off parenting style.”

— Sarah Vowell

84. “This is the derivation of that old Yankee proverb that if you can sell a book, you can move sixty tons of weaponry three hundred miles in winter.”

— Sarah Vowell

85. “I guess if I had to pick a spiritual figurehead to possess the deed to the entirety of Earth, I’d go with Buddha, but only because he wouldn’t want it.”

— Sarah Vowell

86. “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

87. “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

88. “No one I know actually reads what I write, so thank heavens for you strangers.”

— Sarah Vowell

89. “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

90. “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

91. “Before the verb “to electrocute” came to define death by electricity, Edison advocated that the verb be named for his nemesis, that a person who had been electrocuted would have been westinghoused instead. I bet Westinghouse came up with some possible definitions of what it meant to be edisoned himself.”

— Sarah Vowell

92. “I’ve always had these fantasies about being in a normal family in which the parents come to town and their adult daughter spends their entire visit daydreaming of suicide. I’m here to tell you that dreams really do come true.”

— Sarah Vowell

93. “While history might be full of exemplary fathers, recorded history is not where to find them.”

— Sarah Vowell

94. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.”

— Sarah Vowell

95. “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

96. “The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave,” he wrote. “It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.”

— Sarah Vowell

97. “Part of the success of This American Life, I think, is due to the fact that none of us sound like we should be on the radio. We don’t sound professional; we sound like people you would know.”

— Sarah Vowell

98. “Despicable rabble,” however, pretty much summed up George Washington’s opinion of the troops when he arrived in Cambridge in July. In a letter to his brother John, the new commander in chief grumbled, “I found a mixed multitude of People here, under very little discipline, order, or Government.”

— Sarah Vowell

99. “As Beaumarchais gathered blankets and grenades in France, William Howe’s redcoats came ashore and slaughtered Washington’s forces on Long Island, in Brooklyn, and then in Manhattan. A humiliated Washington could do nothing to stop his troops’ shoddy retreat from Kips Bay, swatting at them with his horsewhip and howling, “Are these the men with which I am to defend America?”

— Sarah Vowell

100. “Most people don’t like to talk about violent historical death.”

— Sarah Vowell