Sarah Vowell Quotes

When Lafayette visited Monticello in 1824, his old friend Thomas Jefferson toasted him: When I was stationed in his country for the purpose of cementing its friendship with ours, and of advancing our...

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.

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

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.

I don't have a driver's license (phobia).

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. The more knowledge, the better seems like the a solid rule of...

And all they see is a mash-up of naked prisoners and an American girl in fatigues standing there giving a thumbs-up. As I write this, the United States of America is still a city on a hill; and it's s...

But I have never had the privilege of unhappiness in Happy Valley. California is about the good life. So a bad life there seems so much worse than a bad life anywhere else. Quality is an obsession the...

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

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 Jef...

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

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

Clemenza's overriding responsibility is to his family. He takes a moment out of his routine madness to remember that he had promised his wife that he would bring dessert home. His instruction to his p...

But the Grateful Dead, as the fanatic fans point out, are a way of life: someone else's. Twentieth-century teenagers, especially American ones, have been brilliant at creating their own culture, their...

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.

Turgot turned out to be correct regarding this chilling prophecy: War we ought to shun as the greatest of evils, since it will render impossible for a very long time, and perhaps forever, the reform w...

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?

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...

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.

The groundswell of outrage over the invasion of Iraq often cited the preemptive war as a betrayal of American ideals. The subtext of the dissent was: 'This is not who we are.' But not if you were stan...