Sarah Vowell Quotes

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

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...

I am pro-plaque.

I suspect that the day a person gives up on the Geneva Convention is the day a person gives up on the human race.

However, displayed right alongside all the Confederate flag paraphernalia is a bunch of American flag merch – American flag place mats, patriotic body crystals, flag stickers you attach to your skin....

Lafayette, I did not hesitate to be disagreeable to preserve my independence. Spoken like every only child ever. Lafayette

We were breathing sooty air. The soot was composed of incinerated glass and steel but also, we knew, incinerated human flesh. When the local TV news announced that rescue workers sorting through the r...

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 s...

Never have I enjoyed such swearing, before or since. Sir, on that memorable day, he swore like an angel from Heaven.

While history might be full of exemplary fathers, recorded history is not where to find them.

It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, Washington wrote. For, happily, t...

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 ha...

Of course Americans celebrate Independence Day as opposed to Yorktown Day. Who wants to barbecue a hot dog and ponder how we owe our independence to the French navy? Who wants to twirl sparklers and d...

The words Lafayette used to describe that triumph—I did not hesitate to be disagreeable to preserve my independence—applied to getting his way regarding America as well. Perhaps the most emblematic an...

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.

In other words, ideas, when implemented, turn into precedents with unpredictable and potentially disturbing consequences. As the British historian and politician Lord Acton described the effect that o...

Since the lunchroom does no significant harm to the caverns' ecology, I'd like to believe that this is one of those lucky places where we don't have to choose between doing the right thing and enjoyin...

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

Earlier yet, in 1917, an amateur geologist named Albert E. Knapp claimed to have found a fossilized human footprint from the Triassic period—the imprint of a shoe made of stitched dinosaur hide. This...

The model for South America was Broadway actress Maxine Elliot. North America, a pretty blonde, was modeled on Maud Coleman Woods of Charlottesville, Virginia. (Sadly, she would die of typhoid fever t...