Quote

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

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Sarah Vowell
Age: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 27
Actor
Author
Journalist
Voice Actor
Writer
Muskogee
Oklahoma
Sarah Jane Vowell
Dangerous
People
Belief
Idea
Thought
Ideas
Might
Provoking
Mean
Killed
Thing

More quotes by Sarah Vowell

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Oh my dear, idealists are the cruelest monsters of them all.
Sarah Vowell
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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.
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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.
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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
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There are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who alphabetize their record collections, and the kind who don't.
Sarah Vowell
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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I'm a big fan of editing and keeping only the interesting bits in.
Sarah Vowell
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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
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Behind every bad law, a deep fear.
Sarah Vowell
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
Sarah Vowell
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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
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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