Sarah Vowell Quotes

51 Sourced Quotes

Along with voting, jury duty, and paying taxes, goofing off is one of the central obligations of American citizenship.

Sarah Vowell
The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief. And by dangerous I don't mean thought-provoking. I mean: might get people killed.

Sarah Vowell
Nowadays, ever since the attack on the Pentagon in 2001, the capital has been clamped down. How is this manifested? Giant planters blocking government buildings, giant planters barricading every other street. Theoretically, the concrete flowerpots are solid enough to fend off a truck bomb. And yet the effect is ridiculous, as if we believe we can protect ourselves from suicide bombers by hiding behind blooming pots of marigolds, flowers whose main defensive property is repelling rabbits.

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

Sarah Vowell
No cowboys for Canada. Canada got Mounties instead - Dudley Do-Right, not John Wayne. It's a mind-set of "Here I come to save the day" versus "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.

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

Sarah Vowell
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
Frank Sinatra is the first punk... punk comes out of nowhere... punk is... a rumor that spreads... that guts and perseverence mean more than anything else...

Sarah Vowell
Going to Ford's Theatre to watch the play is like going to Hooters for the food.

Sarah Vowell
Once or twice a day, I am enveloped inside what I like to call the Impenetrable Shield of Melancholy. This shield, it is impenetrable. Hence the name. I cannot speak. And while I can feel myself freeze up, I can't do anything about it.

Sarah Vowell
I understand why other people would want to stay in B&Bs. They're pretty. They're personal. They're quaint, a polite way of saying no TV. They are romantic, i. e., every object large enough for a flower to be printed on it is going to have a flower printed on it. They're cozy, meaning that a guest has to keep her belongings on the floor because every conceivable flat surface is covered in knickknacks, except for the one knickknack she longs for, a remote control.

Sarah Vowell
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
Just the other day, I was in my neighborhood Starbucks, waiting for the post office to open. I was enjoying a chocolatey cafe mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the New World. From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao, and the Dutch invention of the chemical process for making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA, and the lifestyle marketing of Seattle's Starbucks, the modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top. No wonder it costs so much.

Sarah Vowell
In these fast and fickle times, it's nice to know that there are some things you can always count on: the enduring brilliance of the last page of The Great Gatsby; the near-religious harmonies of the Beach Boys' California Girls ; and the lifelong friendship of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

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

Sarah Vowell
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
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
While I gave up God a long time ago, I never shook the habit of wanting to believe in something. So I replaced my creed of everlasting life with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Sarah Vowell
Most people don't like to talk about violent historical death.

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

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

Sarah Vowell
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
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
Jesus and Lincoln, Moses and Jefferson can seem so long gone, so unbelievable, so dead.

Sarah Vowell
Buffy's high school was built on top of a vortex of evil, the Hellmouth. And whose wasn't?

Sarah Vowell
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
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
There are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who alphabetize their record collections, and the kind who don't.

Sarah Vowell