Sarah Vowell Quotes

I wish that the founders had had the foresight to hang on to and enshrine another one of Independence Hall’s chairs, the one that Benjamin Rush mentioned in a letter to John Adams about how Thomas Jefferson objected when his colleagues in the Continental Congress considered a fast day, which Jefferson pooh-poohed as too religious. Rush reminded Adams, ‘You rose and defended the motion, and in reply to Mr. Jefferson’s objections to Christianity you said you were sorry to hear such sentiments …. You suspected, you told me, that you had offended him, but that he soon convinced you to the contrary by crossing the room and taking a seat in the chair next to you.’

Who knows what happened to that particular chair. … But it might have been a more helpful, sobering symbolic object than that chair with the rising sun. Then perhaps citizens making pilgrimages to Independence Hall could file past the chair Jefferson walked across an aisle to sit in, and we could all ponder the amount of respect, affection, and wishy-washy give-and-take needed to keep a house divided in reasonable repair.

"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.

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

She is either male property (Mrs.), wannabe male property (Miss), or man-hating harpy (Ms.).

Despite his consistent party-line voting record, some independents and Democrats still think of Senator McCain as the most palatable, independent-minded Republican. But this is the sort of empty compliment a friend of mine once compared to being called “the coolest Osmond.

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.

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.

So I say to you read! Read! Something will stick in the mind, be diligent and good will come of it.

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.

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

To me, every plaque, no matter what words are inscribed on it, says the same magic informative thing: Something happened! The gum cost a dollar, but the story was free.

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

"It's such a hopeful, almost utopian word, that word "phase." As if any minute, "we" would suffer some sort of Joad overload, come to "our" senses, and for heaven's sake, do something about our godforsaken shoes. But the book phase never ended. The book phase would bloom and grow into a whole series of seasonal affiliations including our communist phase, our beatnik phase, our vegetarian phase, and the three-year period known as Please Don't Talk to Me. Now that we are finishing up the third decade of the book phase, we ask ourselves if we have changed. Sure, we still dress in the bruise palette of gray, black, and blue, and we still haven't gotten around to piercing our ears. But we wear lipstick now, we own high-heeled shoes. Concessions have been made."

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?

The same wakefulness the individual Calvinist was to use to keep watch over his own sins Winthrop and Cotton called for also in the group at large. This humility, this fear, was what kept their delusions of grandeur in check. That's what subsequent generations lost. From New England's Puritans we inherited the idea that America is blessed and ordained by God above all nations, but lost the fear of wrath and retribution.