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
Might
Mean
Provoking
Thing
Killed
People
Dangerous
Belief
Idea
Thought
Ideas

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What are you hiding? No one ever asks that.
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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.
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Buffy's high school was built on top of a vortex of evil, the Hellmouth. And whose wasn't?
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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.
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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.
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You know you've reached a new plateau of group mediocrity when even a Canadian is alarmed by your lack of individuality.
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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.
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Why is America the last best hope of Earth? What if it's Liechtenstein? Or, worse, Canada?
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The only people who know about me are people who would know about me.
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Oh my dear, idealists are the cruelest monsters of them all.
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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'?
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Most people don't like to talk about violent historical death.
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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.
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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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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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Radio is the playground of coincidence.
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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.
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My audience is going to die before I do.
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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.
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Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, Robert Lincoln bought a nice ski lodge.
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