Top 100 Jill Lepore Quotes
#2. He took the trouble to offer "a few gentle Reproofs on those who deserve them," including Harvard students.
Jill Lepore
#4. 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.
Jill Lepore
#5. By the Collision of different Sentiments," Franklin wrote, "Sparks of Truth are struck out, and political Light is obtained.
Jill Lepore
#6. We have hands that must work, brains that must think, and personalities that must be developed.
Jill Lepore
#7. Draw a woman who's as powerful as Superman, as sexy as Miss Fury, as scantily clad as Sheena the jungle queen, and as patriotic as Captain America.
Jill Lepore
#8. Marston liked to say that Wonder Woman was meant to be "psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who, I believe, should rule the world," but neither he nor Gaines seem to have given much thought to hiring a woman to draw her.
Jill Lepore
#9. One Half of the World does not know how the other Half lives, Franklin once wrote. His sister is his other Half.
Jill Lepore
#10. In the last years of the nineteen-eighties, I worked not at startups but at what might be called finish-downs. Tech companies that were dying would hire temps - college students and new graduates - to do what little was left of the work of the employees they'd laid off.
Jill Lepore
#11. A problem with a president who leads by stirring the moral sentiments of voters is that he has got to keep stirring them.
Jill Lepore
#12. The world may not be getting better and better, but our devices are getting newer and newer.
Jill Lepore
#13. Secrecy is what is known, but not to everyone. Privacy is what allows us to keep what we know to ourselves.
Jill Lepore
#14. 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.
Jill Lepore
#15. 'Doctor Who' began as family television: a show that kids and their parents and grandparents can all watch, maybe even together, on the sofa.
Jill Lepore
#16. 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.
Jill Lepore
#17. 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.
Jill Lepore
#18. 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.
Jill Lepore
#19. Scientific management promised to replace rules of thumb with accurate measurements.
Jill Lepore
#21. When I was a kid, I used to deliver the newspaper all over town, cramming papers between screen doors and into mailboxes and under doormats.
Jill Lepore
#22. 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 do do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from.
Jill Lepore
#23. Nineteenth-century grass-roots populism made twentieth-century progressivism possible.
Jill Lepore
#24. Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.
Jill Lepore
#25. Mary Woolley wasn't only a suffragist; she was also a feminist. "Feminism is not a prejudice," she said, "It is a principle.
Jill Lepore
#26. Reviewing a book written by someone you're living with and sleeping with is, needless to say, wrong.
Jill Lepore
#27. 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.
Jill Lepore
#28. Epidemics follow patterns because diseases follow patterns. Viruses spread; they reproduce; they die.
Jill Lepore
#29. The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesn't enter into it.
Jill Lepore
#30. 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.
Jill Lepore
#31. Fiction is the history of the obscure.
Jill Lepore
#32. Early Menstruation renders the Uteri Hard & dry; so that they ought not to prompt the early appearance by obscene books, and frequent touchings.
Jill Lepore
#33. 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.
Jill Lepore
#34. Massachusetts's poor laws required that boys be taught to write and girls to read.7
Jill Lepore
#35. She found, in visits, relief from the aches of old age. "I have Even in my self in times Past Lost the snse of Paine for some time by the Injoyment of good Company." She
Jill Lepore
#36. Some people will always think they know how to make other people's marriages better, and, after a while, they'll get to cudgeling you or selling you something; the really entrepreneurial types will sell you the cudgel.
Jill Lepore
#37. 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.
Jill Lepore
#38. 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.
Jill Lepore
#39. No woman can be gotten with child without some knowledg, consent and delight in the acting thereof." Charles J. Hoadly, ed., Records of the Colony or Jurisdiction of New Haven, From May, 1653, to the Union (Hartford: Case, Lockwood, 1858), 123;
Jill Lepore
#40. Old reference books are like tree rings. Without them, there'd be no way to know what a tree had lived through.
Jill Lepore
#41. That people so often believe themselves to be right is no proof that they are.
Jill Lepore
#42. I always just wanted to be a writer, not necessarily a particular kind of writer.
Jill Lepore
#43. 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.
Jill Lepore
#44. He counted thirteen virtues: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquillity, chastity, and humility. Soon
Jill Lepore
#45. It feels silly to watch endless hours of winter sports every four years, when we never watch them any other time, and we don't even understand the rules, which doesn't stop us from scoring everyone, every run, every skate, every race.
Jill Lepore
#46. Either hide this well or destroy it. It was the family motto.
Jill Lepore
#47. One day, I was playing 'The Game of Life,' the board game, with a mess of kids, and I wasn't quite sure how, but it seemed different than the game I remembered playing as a kid. So I bought an old game, from 1960, and it was different.
Jill Lepore
#48. '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.
Jill Lepore
#49. Wonder Woman didn't begin in 1941 when William Moulton Marston turned in his first script to Sheldon Mayer. Wonder Woman began on a winter day in 1904 when Margaret Sanger dug Olive Byrne out of a snowbank.
Jill Lepore
#50. Well-reported news is a public good; bad news is bad for everyone.
Jill Lepore
#51. In kindergarten, you can learn how to be a citizen of the world.
Jill Lepore
#52. My mother liked to command me to do things I found scary. I always wanted to stay home and read. My mother only ever wanted me to get away.
Jill Lepore
#53. Conservatism cherishes tradition; innovation fetishizes novelty. They tug in different directions, the one toward the past, the other toward the future.
Jill Lepore
#54. The historian, on the contrary, cannot experiment and can rarely observe. Instead, the historian has to collect his own evidence, knowing, all the while, that some of it is useless and much of it unreliable.
-Professor Charles Homer Haskins
Jill Lepore
#55. In 2010, one in four Americans got the news from Fox News.
Jill Lepore
#56. A great deal of what many Americans hold dear is nowhere written on those four pages of parchment, or in any of the amendments. What has made the Constitution durable is the same as what makes it demanding: the fact that so much was left out.
Jill Lepore
#57. Girls are important: Remember that very few stories are of great interest without the rustle of a skirt.
Jill Lepore
#58. No nation has a single history, no people a single song.
Jill Lepore
#59. When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense
is understood NOT as a failure of civil society,
to be mourned,
but as an act of citizenship,
to be vaunted,
there is little civilian life left.
Jill Lepore
#60. 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.
Jill Lepore
#61. Not long before my mother died, I found a long-lost portrait of Jane Franklin's granddaughter, Jane Flagg, aged nine - oil on canvas - in the basement of a public library not a dozen miles from my mother's house.
Jill Lepore
#62. And that's the point; not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don't want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women's strong qualities have become despised because of their week ones.
Jill Lepore
#63. If you know a lot about something and apply that information to a vote that matches your policy preferences, your opinion quality is high.
Jill Lepore
#64. Americans, among the marryingest people in the world, are also the divorcingest.
Jill Lepore
#65. Accepting money from the federal government to conduct research places academic inquiry in the service of national interests.
Jill Lepore
#66. 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.
Jill Lepore
#67. It certainly wasn't the chronicle of a king. The yere of our Lord 1537 was a prince born to king Harry th'eight. It was, instead, the story of a poor boy who learns to read and comes to know as much of politics as a prince. This
Jill Lepore
#68. Many a Man would have been worse, if his Estate had been better.19
Jill Lepore
#69. 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.
Jill Lepore
#70. Book reviewing dates only to the eighteenth century, when, for the first time, there were so many books being printed that magazines - they were new, too - started printing essays about them.
Jill Lepore
#71. History is a long and endlessly interesting argument, where evidence is everything and storytelling is everything else.
Jill Lepore
#72. Since childhood, I wrote a lot of fiction, a lot of stories, but I most loved writing essays.
Jill Lepore
#73. In the end, the judge ruled that no woman has "the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception": if a woman isn't willing to die in childbirth, she shouldn't have sex.
Jill Lepore
#74. Fox News's coverage of 9/11 and the war in Iraq improved its ratings, demonstrated its influence, and intensified the controversy over its practices.
Jill Lepore
#75. I consent, Sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure, that it is not the best.18
Jill Lepore
#76. The most ignorant young man, who knows nothing of the needs of women, thinks himself a competent legislator, because he is a man," Pankhurst told the crowd, eyeing the Harvard men. "This aristocratic attitude is a mistake.
Jill Lepore
#77. 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.
Jill Lepore
#78. The Mercy of some of these Men is Cruelty itself," he wrote. "It were better for us and the Indians also, that we had no Liberty.
Jill Lepore
#79. History's written from what can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by earth.
Jill Lepore
#80. Few American presidents have been unhappier or lonelier in office than Woodrow Wilson.
Jill Lepore
#81. The only difference between the Church of Rome and the Church of England, Franklin joked, is that the former is infallible while the latter is never in the wrong.
Jill Lepore
#82. The very first television ad targeted to women was produced by the Eisenhower-Nixon campaign in 1956. It includes footage of a woman supervising her children doing their homework at the kitchen table.
Jill Lepore
#83. 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.
Jill Lepore
#84. History is only written from what remains.
Jill Lepore
#85. We must be tolerant with ourselves and allow ourselves some deviations from the straight line we set up to follow. Even more we must allow others the same prerogative.
Jill Lepore
#86. Most men indeed as well as most sects in Religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them it is so far error.
Jill Lepore
#87. You can be strong as any boy if you'll work hard and train yourself in athletics, the way boys do.
Jill Lepore
#88. Throughout the nineteen-seventies and eighties, especially during periods of recession, employees were moved from offices to cubicles.
Jill Lepore
#89. My grandmother, who taught me how to cook, didn't know how to read.
Jill Lepore
#90. Detective Comics first appeared in 1937. Superman, written and drawn by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, made his debut in Action Comics #1 in June 1938. Superman was unstoppable; soon, a million Superman comics were being sold every month.45
Jill Lepore
#91. 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.
Jill Lepore
#92. Clarence Darrow, America's best-known trial lawyer, was also one of American history's most skilled orators.
Jill Lepore
#93. As James Madison explained, the Constitution is of no more consequence than the paper on which it is written, unless it be stamped with the approbation of those to whom it is addressed ... THE PEOPLE THEMSELVES.
Jill Lepore
#94. 'Doctor Who' is, unavoidably, a product of mid-twentieth-century debates about Britain's role in the world as its empire unravelled.
Jill Lepore
#95. In the ancient world, taxes were paid in kind: landowners paid in crops or livestock; the landless paid with their labor. Taxing trade made medieval monarchs rich and funded the early-modern state.
Jill Lepore
#96. Modern political science started in the late nineteenth century as a branch of history.
Jill Lepore
#97. 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.
Jill Lepore
#98. 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.
Jill Lepore
#99. 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.
Jill Lepore
#100. 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.
Jill Lepore
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