Top 160 Sarah Vowell Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Parliament would abolish slavery in the British Empire in 1833, thirty years before President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. A return to the British fold in 1778 might have freed American slaves three decades sooner, which is what, an entire generation and a half? Was independence for some of us more valuable than freedom for all of us? As the former slave Frederick Douglass put it in an Independence Day speech in 1852, ‘This is your Fourth of July, not mine.”

— Sarah Vowell

102. “I loved that these two guys argued with each other as if movies actually mattered. Nobody I knew talked about movies that way, but Siskel and Ebert took each movie as it came and talked about whether it was a success on its own terms.”

— Sarah Vowell

103. “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

104. “Along with voting, jury duty, and paying taxes, goofing off is one of the central obligations of American citizenship. So when my friends Joel and Stephen and I play hooky from our jobs in the middle of the afternoon to play Pop-A-Shot in a room full of children, I like to think we are not procrastinators; we are patriots pursuing happiness.”

— Sarah Vowell

105. “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

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

— Sarah Vowell

107. “As the starstruck Lafayette later described his first glimpse of Washington, “It was impossible to mistake for a moment his majestic figure and deportment; nor was he less distinguished by the noble affability of his manner.” What a sweet memory. Still, it does get on my nerves how easy it is for tall people to make a good first impression.”

— Sarah Vowell

108. “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

109. “I’ve encountered my fair share of war reenactors over the years, but I’ve never seen a reenactment of this banal predicament: a tired woman in a dark house answering a child who is supposed to be asleep that she has no idea when Daddy’s coming home.”

— Sarah Vowell

110. “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

111. “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

112. “Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, Robert Lincoln bought a nice ski lodge.”

— Sarah Vowell

113. “Jefferson’s pretty phrases were incomplete without the punctuation of French gunpowder. That.”

— Sarah Vowell

114. “Don’t bring up McKinley. Don’t bring up McKinley.”

— Sarah Vowell

115. “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

116. “In other words, every cent the French government spent on guns for the Americans was another centime it would not have to spend on butter for the starving peasants who would one day storm Versailles.”

— Sarah Vowell

117. “In Woody Allen movies people stood in line for Ingmar Bergman films or Holocaust documentaries talking up media theory to pass the time. At 16 that was my idea of fun. Now that I live in New York I can tell you that people lined up for tickets don’t debate theory. They talk about cute guys at the gym or whether or not they live within walking distance of a Krispy Kreme. I was such a young fogy that growing up involved becoming less mature.”

— Sarah Vowell

118. “Another reason I’m intrigued with the hanged of Salem, especially the women, is that a number of them aroused suspicion in the first place because they were financially independent, or sharp-tongued, or kept to themselves. In other words, they were killed off for living the same sort of life I live right now but with longer skirts and fewer cable channels.”

— Sarah Vowell

119. “Freedom of the press, the surest guaranty of the rights of man.”

— Sarah Vowell

120. “I used to think John Waters movies were on the outlandish side until I came to Maryland. Klam and I stop for lunch at a dark roadside joint that feels like more of a throw-back than the Surratt House ever could. The vegetable of the day is succotash to give you an idea. Technically, it’s a family restaurant, but it will only remind you of your family if your mom chain-smoked menthols.”

— Sarah Vowell

121. “I like that the Mall serves as our national Tuppaware, reliable and empty, waiting to be filled with potluck whatever.”

— Sarah Vowell

122. “What are you hiding? No one ever asks that.”

— Sarah Vowell

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

126. “Ah, spring. May 1778, specifically. Coming up on cannon weather. But then who needs to pay for gunpowder when heatstroke kills for free?”

— Sarah Vowell

127. “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

128. “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

129. “The more history I learn, the more the world fills up with stories.”

— Sarah Vowell

130. “While the melodrama of hucking crates of tea into Boston Harbor continues to inspire civic-minded hotheads to this day, it’s worth remembering the hordes of stoic colonial women who simply swore off tea and steeped basil leaves in boiling water to make the same point. What’s more valiant: littering from a wharf or years of doing chores and looking after children from dawn to dark without caffeine?”

— Sarah Vowell

131. “Wainwright prayed to the graven image of Lafayette, since neither the president nor Congress seemed to be listening. “We, the women of the United States,” she told the bronze Lafayette, “denied the liberty which you helped to gain, and for which we have asked in vain for sixty years, turn to you to plead for us. Speak, Lafayette, dead these hundred years but still living in the hearts of the American people.”

— Sarah Vowell

132. “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

133. “There are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who alphabetize their record collections, and the kind who don’t.”

— Sarah Vowell

134. “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

135. “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

136. “I have intimate knowledge of what it was like to be young and uneasy and outraged under Reagan. My high school was 1980s America in miniature – you either belonged or you didn’t, you learned to seek relief where you could find it.”

— Sarah Vowell

137. “On October 1, Lafayette mailed Adrienne a bubbly update about the progress of his apparently adorable wound. “The surgeons are astonished by the rate at which it heals,” he cooed. “They are in ecstasy every time they dress it, and maintain that it is the most beautiful thing in the world.”

— Sarah Vowell

138. “A gifted violin player in danger of becoming a virtuoso and thus too attached to his instrument handed it over to the Oneida authorities and never played again. When a visiting Canadian teacher complained that the community did not foster “genius or special talent,” Noyes was delighted, replying, “We never expected or desired to produce a Byron, a Napoleon, or a Michelangelo.” You know you’ve reached a new plateau of group mediocrity when even a Canadian is alarmed by your lack of individuality.”

— Sarah Vowell

139. “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

140. “In the forensics novels the contents of a victim’s pockets on the night of her death Say Something about her character. My Ford’s Theatre ticket stub and Jimmy Carter key chain say that I am the corniest, goody-goody person in town. Luckily, I survived the evening unscathed so no one will ever find out about that losery Jimmy Carter key chain.”

— Sarah Vowell

141. “In his reply, Washington acknowledged his fellow Americans’ “fatal tendency of disunion.” The.”

— Sarah Vowell

142. “That, to me, is the quintessential experience of living in the United States: constantly worrying whether or not the country is about to fall apart.”

— Sarah Vowell

143. “I get younger people who watch Conan or The Daily Show, but before that it was mostly people who knew me from public radio. Those people are kind of old.”

— Sarah Vowell

144. “I did not hesitate to be disagreeable to preserve my independence.”

— Sarah Vowell

145. “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

146. “The only people who know about me are people who would know about me.”

— Sarah Vowell

147. “History repeats itself. The first time as tragedy. The second time as farce. The third time as tourist trap.”

— Sarah Vowell

148. “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

149. “Yes, they’re a little biased there,” I agree. Mike smiles at this understatement, knowing as I do that saying they’re a little biased in Mudd’s favor at the Mudd-family-run Mudd home in Maryland is like saying cheese steaks are kind of associated with Philadelphia.”

— Sarah Vowell

150. “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