Words matter. These are the best Jill Lepore Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
My grandmother, who taught me how to cook, didn’t know how to read.
Secrecy is what is known, but not to everyone. Privacy is what allows us to keep what we know to ourselves.
I always just wanted to be a writer, not necessarily a particular kind of writer.
Weirdly, there have been a lot of critics of conservatism, but very few critics of innovation. As a culture, we are deeply paranoid about politics, but we gaze upon innovation with rapturous adulation.
Old reference books are like tree rings. Without them, there’d be no way to know what a tree had lived through.
The Karen Ann Quinlan case is where the right to life and the right to die got bound together, and I don’t think they’ve ever gotten untangled.
In antihistory, time is an illusion.
In the trunk of her car, my mother used to keep a collapsible easel, a clutch of brushes, a little wooden case stocked with tubes of paint, and, tucked into the spare-tire well, one of my father’s old, tobacco-stained shirts, for a smock.
The Olympics is an imperfect interregnum, the parade of nations a fantasy about a peace never won. It offers little relief from strife and no harbor from terror.
Presidential biography is, by its nature, out of scale; no character is bigger, no action greater, than the person and the doings of the American president.
Throughout the nineteen-seventies and eighties, especially during periods of recession, employees were moved from offices to cubicles.
Conservatism cherishes tradition; innovation fetishizes novelty. They tug in different directions, the one toward the past, the other toward the future.
‘Doctor Who’ is the most original science-fiction television series ever made. It is also one of the longest-running television shows of all time.
As many as two out of every three Europeans who came to the colonies were debtors on arrival: they paid for their passage by becoming indentured servants.
Epidemiologists study patterns in order to combat infection. Stories about epidemics follow patterns, too. Stories aren’t often deadly, but they can be virulent: spreading fast, weakening resistance, wreaking havoc.
Desktop computers – boxes inside boxes – began appearing in those cubicles in the mid-eighties, electrical cords curling on the floor like so many ropes.
Accepting money from the federal government to conduct research places academic inquiry in the service of national interests.
Folklore used to be passed by word of mouth, from one generation to the next; that’s what makes it folklore, as opposed to, say, history, which is written down and stored in an archive.
The stories about epidemics that are told in the American press – their plots and tropes – date to the nineteen-twenties, when modern research science, science journalism, and science fiction were born.
The idea of progress – the notion that human history is the history of human betterment – dominated the world view of the West between the Enlightenment and the First World War.
When business became big business – conglomerates employing hundreds and even thousands of people – companies divided themselves into still smaller units.
In kindergarten, you can learn how to be a citizen of the world.
Since childhood, I wrote a lot of fiction, a lot of stories, but I most loved writing essays.
We have discharged one generation of debtors after another, but we do not find that their numbers lessen. We find only that we forget, when times are good, that times were ever bad.
Nineteenth-century grass-roots populism made twentieth-century progressivism possible.
Clarence Darrow, America’s best-known trial lawyer, was also one of American history’s most skilled orators.
The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesn’t enter into it.
A problem with a president who leads by stirring the moral sentiments of voters is that he has got to keep stirring them.
‘Doctor Who’ began as family television: a show that kids and their parents and grandparents can all watch, maybe even together, on the sofa.
In 2010, one in four Americans got the news from Fox News.
Damning taxes is a piece of cake. It’s defending them that’s hard.
History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what to do next, which is why it’s worth trying to know where things come from.
One thing that always frustrated me was that, while Benjamin Franklin’s was the best-known face of the eighteenth century, no one ever took his sister’s likeness.
Few American presidents have been unhappier or lonelier in office than Woodrow Wilson.
As with the factory, so with the office: in an assembly line, the smaller the piece of work assigned to any single individual, the less skill it requires, and the less likely the possibility that doing it well will lead to doing something more interesting and better paid.
The idea that debt is necessary for trade, and has to be forgiven, is consequent to the rise of a market economy. The idea that debt is wrong and should be punished is a feature of a moral economy.
Secret government programs that pry into people’s private affairs are bound up with ideas about secrecy and privacy that arose during the process by which the mysterious became secular.
In the nineteen-thirties, one in four Americans got their news from William Randolph Hearst, who lived in a castle and owned twenty-eight newspapers in nineteen cities.
Political elites vote in a more partisan fashion than the mass public; this tendency, too, follows a curve. The more you know, the more likely you are to vote in an ideologically consistent way, not just following your party but following a set of constraints dictated by a political ideology.
I was obsessed with George Orwell for years. I remember going to the town library and having to put in interlibrary loan requests to get the compilation of his BBC radio pieces. I had to get everything he ever wrote.
‘Doctor Who’ is, unavoidably, a product of mid-twentieth-century debates about Britain’s role in the world as its empire unravelled.
As a matter of historical analysis, the relationship between secrecy and privacy can be stated in an axiom: the defense of privacy follows, and never precedes, the emergence of new technologies for the exposure of secrets.
Historians once assumed that when childhood mortality was high, people must not have loved their children very much; it would have been too painful. Research has since proved that assumption wrong.
Middle-class mothers and fathers turned out to be a very well-defined consumer group, easily gulled into buying almost anything that might remedy their parental deficiencies.
My mother married my father in 1956. She was twenty-eight, and he was thirty-one. She loved him with a fierce steadiness borne of loyalty, determination, and an unyielding dignity.
History’s written from what can be found; what isn’t saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by earth.
Well-reported news is a public good; bad news is bad for everyone.
Mainly, the more faddish and newer stages of life are really just marketing schemes. Tweenhood. The young old. The quarter-life crisis. You can sell a lot of junk to a lot of people by inventing a stage of life and giving it a name.
History is only written from what remains.
Stages of life are artifacts. Adolescence is a useful contrivance, midlife is a moving target, senior citizens are an interest group, and tweenhood is just plain made up.
