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.Collection: Independence
Assassins and presidents invite the same basic question: Just who do you think you are?
I'm a big fan of editing and keeping only the interesting bits in.
Relics are treasured as something close to the divine.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I seem to have no problem revealing my crush on the man who murdered Lincoln.
I was a big Nancy Drew reader. Nancy figures it out. Case closed.
In death, you get upgraded into a saint no matter how much people hated you in life.
Jesus and Lincoln, Moses and Jefferson can seem so long gone, so unbelievable, so dead.
Like Lincoln, I would like to believe the ballot is stronger than the bullet. Then again, he said that before he got shot.
Most people don't like to talk about violent historical death.
My audience is going to die before I do.
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.
One night last summer, all the killers in my head assembled on a stage in Massachusetts to sing show tunes.
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.
The one time I was an actor, it happened to be in a globally dominant juggernaut. That was lucky.
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.
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.
What are you hiding? No one ever asks that.
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.
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.Collection: Drinking
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.Collection: Caring
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.Collection: Aztec
The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief.Collection: Ideas
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).Collection: Running
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. Personally, I’m small-minded and literal enough that I see the two symbols as contradictory, especially in a time of war. But I fear that the consumer who buys a Confederate flag coffee cup, which she will then put on her American flag place mat, is the sort of sophisticated thinker who is open-minded enough that she is capable of hating blacks and Arabs at the same time.Collection: Hate
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.Collection: Cities
American history is a quagmire, and the more one knows, the quaggier the mire gets.Collection: Quagmire
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.Collection: Ethos
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.Collection: Coffee
There are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who alphabetize their record collections, and the kind who don't.Collection: Two
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.Collection: Mean
History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.Collection: War
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.Collection: Mean
You know, it's always good to have a synonym just for variety.Collection: Synonym
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.Collection: Cowboy
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.Collection: Party
You know you've reached a new plateau of group mediocrity when even a Canadian is alarmed by your lack of individuality.Collection: Individuality
My lips are chapped from the winds of change.Collection: Wind
The modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on topCollection: Aztec
The only people who know about me are people who would know about me.Collection: People
Until that moment, I hadn't realized that I embarked on the project of touring historic sites and monuments having to do with the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley right around the time my country iffily went to war, which is to say right around the time my resentment of the current president cranked up into contempt. Not that I want the current president killed. Like that director, I will, for the record (and for the FBI agent assigned to read this and make sure I mean no harm — hello there), clearly state that while I am obsessed with death, I am against it.Collection: Country
Behind every bad law, a deep fear.Collection: Law
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.Collection: Children