Lafayette in the Somewhat United States Quotes

“That, to me, is the quintessential experience of living in the United States: constantly worrying whether or not the country is about to fall apart.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“While the melodrama of hucking crates of tea into Boston Harbor continues to inspire civic-minded hotheads to this day, it’s worth remembering the hordes of stoic colonial women who simply swore off tea and steeped basil leaves in boiling water to make the same point. What’s more valiant: littering from a wharf or years of doing chores and looking after children from dawn to dark without caffeine?”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“You know your country has a checkered past when you find yourself sitting around pondering the humanitarian upside of sticking with the British Empire.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“Freedom of expression truly exists only when a society’s most repugnant nitwits are allowed to spew their nonsense in public.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“Considering Independence Hall was also where the founders calculated that a slave equals three-fifths of a person and cooked up an electoral college that lets Florida and Ohio pick our presidents, making an adolescent who barely spoke English a major general at the age I got hired to run the cash register at a Portland pizza joint was not the worst decision ever made there.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“I do not think that there can ever be enough books about anything; and I say that knowing that some of them are going to be about Pilates.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“Parliament would abolish slavery in the British Empire in 1833, thirty years before President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. A return to the British fold in 1778 might have freed American slaves three decades sooner, which is what, an entire generation and a half? Was independence for some of us more valuable than freedom for all of us? As the former slave Frederick Douglass put it in an Independence Day speech in 1852, 'This is your Fourth of July, not mine'.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“After Dickinson and Adams had it out over the Olive Branch Petition, Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, that he and Dickinson “are not to be on speaking terms.” How sad is it that this tiff sort of cheers me up? If two of the most distinguished, dedicated, and thoughtful public servants in the history of this republic could not find a way to agree to disagree, how can we expect the current crop of congressional blockheads to get along?”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“The scene of Washington cussing out Charles Lee was for some reason not included in the series of bronze illustrations of the Battle of Monmouth on the monument at the county courthouse. Even though it was the most New Jersey–like behavior in the battle, if not the entire war.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“To Arendt’s point about post-revolution stability deriving from pre-revolutionary experience in self government, it’s worth remembering that two of Henry’s less chatty fellow burgesses became the first and third presidents of the United States. Andrew O’Shaughnessy, referring to the masterminds of the 2013 government shutdown and no doubt alluding to the freshman senator who was its ringleader, told me, “Experience is terribly important. You’ll notice that the congressmen who want to hold up the government are all junior people and new to the game. And of course they will say, ‘Oh, it’s Washington cynicism, where they all compromise and work out backroom deals.’ But that’s actually how democracy works.” Which is exactly how government operations resumed on October 17, 2013: a bipartisan group of old-school senators with the combined age of Stonehenge started hashing out a bargain drafted by third-term moderate Republican Susan Collins of Maine, who, prior to her election sixteen years earlier, had spent twelve years working behind the scenes as a legislative aide to her predecessor.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“While history might be full of exemplary fathers, recorded history is not where to find them.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“I did not hesitate to be disagreeable to preserve my independence.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“When Lafayette met him in 1775, the first volume of Raynal’s 1770 History of the Two Indies had already been banned, which is to say it was a popular success, the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books being the unofficial bestseller list of the day.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“The newly dubbed General Lafayette was only nineteen years old. Considering Independence Hall was also where the founders calculated that a slave equals three-fifths of a person and cooked up an electoral college that lets Florida and Ohio pick our presidents, making an adolescent who barely spoke English a major general at the age I got hired to run the cash register at a Portland pizza joint was not the worst decision ever made there.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights,” Washington wrote. “For, happily, the Government of the United States . . . gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“Steuben explained to his friend, “You say to your soldier, ‘Do this,’ and he does it; but I am obliged to say, ‘This is the reason why you ought to do that,’ and then he does it.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“I wish that the founders had had the foresight to hang on to and enshrine another one of Independence Hall’s chairs, the one that Benjamin Rush mentioned in a letter to John Adams about how Thomas Jefferson objected when his colleagues in the Continental Congress considered a fast day, which Jefferson pooh-poohed as too religious. Rush reminded Adams, ‘You rose and defended the motion, and in reply to Mr. Jefferson’s objections to Christianity you said you were sorry to hear such sentiments …. You suspected, you told me, that you had offended him, but that he soon convinced you to the contrary by crossing the room and taking a seat in the chair next to you.’

Who knows what happened to that particular chair. … But it might have been a more helpful, sobering symbolic object than that chair with the rising sun. Then perhaps citizens making pilgrimages to Independence Hall could file past the chair Jefferson walked across an aisle to sit in, and we could all ponder the amount of respect, affection, and wishy-washy give-and-take needed to keep a house divided in reasonable repair.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“The most meaningful namesake by far is Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House. Also known as Lafayette Park, this is the nation’s capital of protest, the place where we the people gather together to yell at our presidents. In each corner of this seven-acre park stands a statue of four of the most revered European officers who served in the Revolutionary War: Lafayette, Rochambeau, Steuben, and Thaddeus Kosciuszko, the Polish engineer whose defensive works contributed to the Continental Army’s victory at Saratoga.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“In other words, every cent the French government spent on guns for the Americans was another centime it would not have to spend on butter for the starving peasants who would one day storm Versailles.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“I’ve encountered my fair share of war reenactors over the years, but I’ve never seen a reenactment of this banal predicament: a tired woman in a dark house answering a child who is supposed to be asleep that she has no idea when Daddy’s coming home.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“If two of the most distinguished, dedicated, and thoughtful public servants in the history of this republic could not find a way to agree to disagree, how can we expect the current crop of congressional blockheads to get along?”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“Whether or not the United States has saved the world, it did save France a time or two. When the American Expeditionary Forces commanded by General John J. Pershing came to the aid of France during World War I, they marched into Paris on July 4, 1917, heading straight for Picpus Cemetery. Colonel Charles E. Stanton, whose uncle had been Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of war, addressed the French people while standing before Lafayette’s tomb. “America has joined forces with the Allied Powers,” he said, “and what we have of blood and treasure are yours. Therefore it is that with loving pride we drape the colors in tribute of respect to this citizen of your great republic. And here and now, in the presence of the illustrious dead, we pledge our hearts and our honor in carrying this war to a successful issue. Lafayette, we are here.” •”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“That Steuben, who needed a translator, what with his English vocabulary consisting almost entirely of swear words, ended up being the perfect hire to upgrade the Continental Army should rattle every search committee, small-business owner, casting director, college admissions officer, headhunter, and voter.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“Not until Theodore Roosevelt resigned his prestigious position as assistant secretary of the navy in 1898 to fight with the Rough Riders in the Cuban dirt would there be a rich man as weirdly rabid to join American forces in combat as Lafayette was. The two shared a child’s ideal of manly military glory. Though in Lafayette’s defense, he was an actual teenager, unlike the thirty-nine-year-old TR.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“Devoted to principles of liberty, equality, and religious tolerance -- which, dear internet, is not necessarily the same thing as satanism -- Masonic lodge became the de facto clubhouses of the Age of Reason.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“As a Frenchman who represented neither North nor South, East nor West, left nor right, Yankees nor Red Sox, Lafayette has always belonged to all of us.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“With temperatures dropping, how could men without shirts expect to fend off opponents so blatantly well equipped with outerwear that they were nicknamed the redcoats?”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“Oh, if only that was the last time in America that the extreme left and extreme right broke down and made a mess of things, leaving everyone in the center to suffer.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“Lafayette lifted his glass at one reception to toast ‘the perpetual union of the United States,’ adding, ‘it has always saved us in time of storm; one day it will save the world.’” Whether”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States