79+ Sarah Vowell Quotes On Education, Freedom And Friendship

Sarah Vowell is an American author, journalist, essayist, and social commentator. She is best known for her humorous and often ironic commentaries on American popular culture and her advocacy of public education and progressive politics. She has written several books, including The Wordy Shipmates, Assassination Vacation, and Unfamiliar Fishes. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Sarah Vowell on education, freedom, friendship.

Top 10 Sarah Vowell Quotes

1. Like Lincoln, I would like to believe the ballot is stronger than the bullet. Then again, he said that before he got shot.
2. 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.
3. The modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. My lips are chapped from the winds of change.
7. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.
8. 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.
9. You know, it's always good to have a synonym just for variety.
10. In death, you get upgraded into a saint no matter how much people hated you in life.

Sarah Vowell Short Quotes

• American history is a quagmire, and the more one knows, the quaggier the mire gets.
• Assassins and presidents invite the same basic question: Just who do you think you are?
• Oh my dear, idealists are the cruelest monsters of them all.
• What are you hiding? No one ever asks that.
• The true American patriot is by definition skeptical of the government.
• Buffy's high school was built on top of a vortex of evil, the Hellmouth. And whose wasn't?
• Relics are treasured as something close to the divine.
• Behind every bad law, a deep fear.
• Radio is the playground of coincidence.
• My ideal picture of citizenship will always be an argument, not a sing-along.

Sarah Vowell Quotes About Lincoln

I discovered that Robert Todd Lincoln was there for each of the first three assassinations. I wanted to write about the Lincoln Memorial, so when I found out he had attended its dedication, that helped focus it further. — Sarah Vowell

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

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

I seem to have no problem revealing my crush on the man who murdered Lincoln. — Sarah Vowell

Robert Todd Lincoln, a.k.a. Jinxy McDeath. — Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Quotes About People

I didn't come from any kind of academic background, but I lived in a college town and I knew people who weren't without pretense. There was this idea in the town that if something was European it would be good. — Sarah Vowell

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

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. — 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

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

The only people who know about me are people who would know about me. — Sarah Vowell

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. — Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Famous Quotes And Sayings

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 partner in crime is an entire moral manifesto in six little words: 'Leave the gun. Take the cannoli. — Sarah Vowell

I loved that these two guys argued with each other as if movies actually mattered. Nobody I knew talked about movies that way, but Siskel and Ebert took each movie as it came and talked about whether it was a success on its own terms. — Sarah Vowell

I talk about going to his [George W. Bush's] Inauguration and crying when he took the oath, 'cause I was so afraid he was going to "wreck the economy and muck up the drinking water"... the failure of my pessimistic imagination at that moment boggles my mind now. — 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

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. — Sarah Vowell

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. — 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

There are people who look forward to spending their sunset years in the sunshine; it is my own retirement dream to await my death indoors, dragging strangers up dusty staircases while coughing up one of the most thrilling phrases in the English language: 'It was on this spot…' My fantasy is to one day become a docent. — 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

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

Presidents and presidential assassins are like Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. Even though one city is all about sin and the other is all about salvation, they are identical, one-dimensional company towns built up by the sheer will of true believers. — Sarah Vowell

Not that I want the current president killed. I will, for the record and for the FBI agent assigned to read this and make sure I mean no harm, clearly state that while I am obsessed with death, I am against it. — Sarah Vowell

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. — Sarah Vowell

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

I'm always disappointed when I see the word 'Puritan' tossed around as shorthand for a bunch of generic, boring, stupid, judgmental killjoys. Because to me, they are very specific, fascinating, sometimes brilliant, judgmental killjoys who rarely agreed on anything except that Catholics are going to Hell. — Sarah Vowell

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

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

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

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

Listening to the radio every day for an entire year was a prison sentence. It was the most depressing, annoying, debilitating project I have ever undertaken, and I have a master's degree in art history. — Sarah Vowell

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. — 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

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. — Sarah Vowell

I have a similar affection for the parenthesis (but I always take most of my parentheses out, so as not to call undue attention to the glaring fact that I cannot think in complete sentences, that I think only in short fragments or long, run-on thought relays that the literati call stream of consciousness but I still like to think of as disdain for the finality of the period). — Sarah Vowell

We go in to liberate Cuba, but Cuba still isn't free; we don't really think through what we'll do after the initial treaty is signed, but we're still occupying. There's chaos and torture and finally an outcry. — Sarah Vowell

If I looked in the mirror someday and saw no dark circles under my eyes, I would probably look better. I just wouldn't look like me. — 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

My audience is going to die before I do. — Sarah Vowell

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

In the U.S.A., we want to sing along with the chorus and ignore the verses, ignore the blues. . . No one is going to hold up a cigarette lighter in a stadium to the tune of "mourn together, suffer together." City on a hill, though -- that has a backbeat we can dance to. And that's why the citizens of the United States not only elected and reelected Ronald Reagan; that's why we ARE Ronald Reagan. — Sarah Vowell

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

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. — Sarah Vowell

I was a big Nancy Drew reader. Nancy figures it out. Case closed. — Sarah Vowell

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. — Sarah Vowell

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

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

I'm not really the scented envelope kid of girl, preferring instead to send yellow Jiffy-lite mailers packed with whatever song is on my mind. — Sarah Vowell

That's what I like to call him, "the current president." I find it difficult to say or type his name, George W. Bush. I like to call him "the current president" because it's a hopeful phrase, implying that his administration is only temporary. — Sarah Vowell

But when I am around strangers, I turn into a conversational Mount St. Helens. I'm dormant, dormant, quiet, quiet, old-guy loners build log cabins on the slopes of my silence and then, boom, it's 1980. Once I erupt, they'll be wiping my verbal ashes off their windshields as far away as North Dakota. — Sarah Vowell

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. — Sarah Vowell

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

Even writers need relief from words. — Sarah Vowell

The one time I was an actor, it happened to be in a globally dominant juggernaut. That was lucky. — Sarah Vowell

Life Lessons by Sarah Vowell

1. Sarah Vowell emphasizes the importance of understanding and appreciating history, as it can help us to better understand the world we live in.
2. She encourages us to think critically and question the status quo, and to be aware of the power of language and how it can shape our understanding of the world.
3. She also encourages us to be mindful of our own biases and to strive to be more open-minded and tolerant of different perspectives.