Quote

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

Sarah Vowell

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Sarah Vowell
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 27
Actor
Author
Journalist
Voice Actor
Writer
Muskogee
Oklahoma
Sarah Jane Vowell
Shots
Stronger
Believe
Ballot
Would
Ballots
Like
Bullet
Lincoln
Bullets
Shot

More quotes by Sarah Vowell

Image
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
Image
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
Image
You know, it's always good to have a synonym just for variety.
Sarah Vowell
Image
Being a nerd, which is to say going to far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know. For me, the spark that turns an acquaintance into a friend has usually been kindled by some shared enthusiasm like detective novels or Ulysses S. Grant.
Sarah Vowell
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Jesus and Lincoln, Moses and Jefferson can seem so long gone, so unbelievable, so dead.
Sarah Vowell
Image
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
Image
In death, you get upgraded into a saint no matter how much people hated you in life.
Sarah Vowell
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Sarah Vowell
Image
The only people who know about me are people who would know about me.
Sarah Vowell
Image
History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.
Sarah Vowell
Image
I'm a big fan of editing and keeping only the interesting bits in.
Sarah Vowell
Image
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
Image
What are you hiding? No one ever asks that.
Sarah Vowell