The Wordy Shipmates Quotes

“The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

“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, The Wordy Shipmates

“Behind every bad law, a deep fear.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

“[Martin Luther King, Jr.] concluded the learned discourse that came to be known as the 'loving your enemies' sermon this way: 'So this morning, as I look into your eyes and into the eyes of all my brothers in Alabama and all over America and over the world, I say to you,'I love you. I would rather die than hate you.''

Go ahead and reread that. That is hands down the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical thing a human being can say. And it comes from reading the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical civics lesson ever taught, when Jesus of Nazareth went to a hill in Galilee and told his disciples, 'Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

“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, The Wordy Shipmates

“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, The Wordy Shipmates

“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, The Wordy Shipmates

“She is either male property (Mrs.), wannabe male property (Miss), or man-hating harpy (Ms.).”
― Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

“Because of the "city upon a hill" sound bite, "A Model of Christian Charity" is one of the formative documents outlining the idea of America. But 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, The Wordy Shipmates

“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, The Wordy Shipmates

“The most important reason I am concentrating on Winthrop and his shipmates in the 1630s is that the country I live in is haunted by the Puritans’ vision of themselves as God’s chosen people, as a beacon of righteousness that all others are to admire.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

“So I say to you read! Read! Something will stick in the mind, be diligent and good will come of it.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

“Let us thank God for having given us such ancestors; and let each successive generation thank Him, not less fervently, for being one step further from them in the march of ages.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

“For years they’ve grumbled that England is a cesspool governed by an immoral king under the spell of the Whore of Babylon, which is their cute nickname for the pope.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

“In The Bloudy Tenent, Williams points out that Constantine "did more to hurt Christ Jesus than the raging fury of the most bloody Neroes." at least under the Christian persecutor Nero, who was rumored to have had the Apostle Paul beheaded and Saint Peter crucified upside down, Christianity was a pure (if hazardous) way of life. But when Constantine himself converted to Christianity, that's when the Church was corrupted and perverted by the state. Williams explains that under Constantine, "the gardens of Christ's churches turned into the wildernesss of national religion, and the world (under Constantine's dominion) to the most unchristian Christendom." Legalizing, legitimizing the Church turned Christianity into just another branch of government enforced by "the sword of civil power," i.e., through state-sponsored violence.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

“Protestantism's evolution away from hierarchy and authority has enormous consequences for America and the world. On the one hand, the democratization of religion runs parallel to political democratization. The king of England, questioning the pope, inspires English subjects to question the king and his Anglican bishops. Such dissent is backed up by a Bible full of handy Scripture arguing for arguing with one's kIng. This is the root of self-government in the English-speaking world.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

“Cotton says, “If God be the gardener, who shall pluck up what he sets down?” Hear that, Indians? No weeding of the white people allowed. Unless they’re Catholic. Or one of those Satan-worshipping Virginians.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

“I swear on Peter Stuyvesant’s peg leg that the country that became the U.S. bears a closer family resemblance to the devil-may-care merchants of New Amsterdam than it does to Boston’s communitarian English majors.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

“Luther’s point was that, according to Scripture, salvation is not a bake sale:”
― Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

“This is a sappy way to put it, but the Winthrop who warns Williams is the Winthrop I fell in love with, the Winthrop Cotton Mather celebrates for sharing his firewood with the needy, the Winthrop who scolds Thomas Dudley for overcharging the poor, the Winthrop of 'Christian Charity,' who called for 'enlargement toward others' and 'brotherly affection,' admonishing that 'if thy brother be in want and thou canst help him...if thou lovest God thou must help him.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

“We were breathing sooty air. The soot was composed of incinerated glass and steel but also, we knew, incinerated human flesh. When the local TV news announced that rescue workers sorting through the rubble in search of survivors were in need of toothpaste, half my block, having heard that there was finally something we could actually do besides worry and grieve, had already cleaned out the most popular brands at the corner deli by the time I got there, so at the rescue workers' headquarters I sheepishly dropped off fourteen tubes of Sensodyne, the toothpaste for sensitive teeth.

We were members of the same body, breathing the cremated lungs of the dead and hoping to clean the teeth of the living.(Pg. 53)”
― Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

“Why is America the last best hope of Earth? What if it's Liechtenstein? Or, worse, Canada?”
― Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

“The same wakefulness the individual Calvinist was to use to keep watch over his own sins Winthrop and Cotton called for also in the group at large. This humility, this fear, was what kept their delusions of grandeur in check. That's what subsequent generations lost. From New England's Puritans we inherited the idea that America is blessed and ordained by God above all nations, but lost the fear of wrath and retribution.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

“The irony of informing nearly naked people in a wilderness setting about the story of naked Adam and Eve eating the fruit of knowledge and inventing the fashion industry due to a sudden need for clothing to hide their shame is not lost on Williams.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

“The names of the compact's signers, including Anne Hutchinson's husband, Will, are listed below the text. Here lies the deepest reason why the Woman's Healing Garden strikes me as so forlorn - that Hutchinson is remembered here by pink echinacea in bloom instead of on the Portsmouth Compact plaque, where she belongs. All of the signers were there because of her, because she stood up to Massachusetts and they stood with her. But all the signers were men. Anne Hutchinson wasn't allowed to sign the founding document of the colony she founded.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

“Professor Winthrop delivered an influential lecture at Harvard proposing the earthquake might have been caused by heat and pressure below the surface of the earth. With God’s help, of course, but God comes off as an engineer instead of a hothead vigilante.)”
― Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

“the amateur historian’s next stop after Boy, people used to be so stupid is People: still stupid.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

“Then Cotton quotes Luke 12:48. “To whom much is given, of him God will require the more.” Of course there’s a catch, Spider-Man. When God is the landlord, Cotton says, “defraud him not of his rent.” The price? Obedience.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

“In other words, after Winthrop has acquired all his butter firkins, food stirrers, and beer along with six dozen candles, twenty thousand biscuits, and twenty-nine sides of beef, he goes through the Bible and writes down a bunch of verses commanding him to be willing to cheerfully give all that stuff away. My firkin is your firkin being one of Christianity's primary creeds.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

“Protestantism's evolution away from hierarchy and authority has enormous consequences for America and the world. On the one hand, the democratization of religion runs parallel to political democratization. The king of England, questioning the pope, inspires English subjects to question the king and his Anglican bishops. Such dissent is backed up by a Bible full of handy Scripture arguing for arguing with one's kIng. This is the root of self-government in the English-speaking world.

On the other hand, Protestantism's shedding away of authority, as evidenced by my [Pentecostal] mother's proclamation that I needn't go to church or listen to a preacher to achieve salvation, inspires self-reliance—along with a dangerous disregard for expertise. So the impulse that leads to democracy can also be the downside of democracy—namely, a suspicion of people who know what they are talking about. It's why in U.S. presidential elections the American people will elect a wisecracking good ol' boy who's fun in a malt shop instead of a serious thinker who actually knows some of the pompous, brainy stuff that might actually get fewer people laid off or killed.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates