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Book: The Wordy Shipmates
Quotes of Book: The Wordy Shipmates

Sarah Vowell _ The Wordy Shipmates
joie de vivre.
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Sarah Vowell _ The Wordy Shipmates
the amateur historian's next stop after Boy, people used to be so stupid is People: still stupid.
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Sarah Vowell _ The Wordy Shipmates
And all they see is a mash-up of naked prisoners and an American girl in fatigues standing there giving a thumbs-up. As I write this, the United States of America is still a city on a hill; and it's still shining-because we never turn off the lights in our torture prisons. That's how we carry out the sleep deprivation.
book-quote city-on-the-hill abu-ghraib
Sarah Vowell _ The Wordy Shipmates
The English Puritans were obsessed with the idea of providence, and that word is more ominous to them than it sounds to us. It means care, but it also means control. It does not just mean that God will provide. It means that God will provide whatever the hell God wants and the Puritans will thank him for it even if He provides them with nothing more than a slow death in a long winter. It means that if they're scared and small and lowly enough He just might toss a half-eaten corncob their way. It means that the world isn't fair and it's their fault. It means that God is the sovereign, the . It means manna from heaven, but it also means bow down.
book-quote providence authoritarianism calvinism
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.
book-quote democracy protestantism anti-intellectualism
Sarah Vowell _ The Wordy Shipmates
--a man without birth, without courage, without conduct. For my part, I declare, sir, it shall never be said that I made such a man my master."
book-quote self-respect leadership-traits
Sarah Vowell _ The Wordy Shipmates
Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them, especially the university at Cambridge, public schools, and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings, sincerity, good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people. "It was, in all," writes McCullough, "a declaration of Adams's faith in education as the bulwark of the good society, the old abiding faith of his Puritan forebears.
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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.
book-quote irony hubris
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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