Sarah Vowell Quotes

Like Lincoln, I would like to believe the ballot is stronger than the bullet. Then again, he said that before he got shot.

Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know.

The modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top

My lips are chapped from the winds of change.

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.

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.

History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.

What are you hiding? No one ever asks that.

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.

You know, it's always good to have a synonym just for variety.

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.

The only people who know about me are people who would know about me.

We are flawed creatures, all of us. Some of us think that means we should fix our flaws. But get rid of my flaws and there would be no one left.

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

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

Oh my dear, idealists are the cruelest monsters of them all.

Radio is the playground of coincidence.

I probably am a cranky writer, but I am actually a fairly nice, normal person. Since I'm a grouchy writer, of course I have friends whose books are doing way better than mine.

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.

I'm a big fan of editing and keeping only the interesting bits in.

Assassins and presidents invite the same basic question: Just who do you think you are?

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

The true American patriot is by definition skeptical of the government.

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.

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.

Robert Todd Lincoln, a.k.a. Jinxy McDeath.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Relics are treasured as something close to the divine.

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

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

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

History is full of really good stories. That's the main reason I got into this racket: I want to make the argument that history is interesting.

Behind every bad law, a deep fear.

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.

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

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

Even writers need relief from words.

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

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

When I think about my relationship with America, I feel like a battered wife: Yeah, he knocks me around a lot, but boy, he sure can dance.

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

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.

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

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.

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.