Top 100 Jill Lepore Quotes
#1. '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
#2. No nation has a single history, no people a single song.
Jill Lepore
#3. Girls are important: Remember that very few stories are of great interest without the rustle of a skirt.
Jill Lepore
#4. An ordinary life used to look something like this: born into a growing family, you help rear your siblings, have the first of your own half-dozen or even dozen children soon after you're grown, and die before your youngest has left home.
Jill Lepore
#5. 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
#6. In 2010, one in four Americans got the news from Fox News.
Jill Lepore
#7. 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
#9. Conservatism cherishes tradition; innovation fetishizes novelty. They tug in different directions, the one toward the past, the other toward the future.
Jill Lepore
#10. 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
#11. In kindergarten, you can learn how to be a citizen of the world.
Jill Lepore
#12. Well-reported news is a public good; bad news is bad for everyone.
Jill Lepore
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Either hide this well or destroy it. It was the family motto.
Jill Lepore
#17. A mystery, in Christian theology, is what God knows and man cannot, and must instead believe.
Jill Lepore
#18. 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.
Jill Lepore
#19. 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
#20. He counted thirteen virtues: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquillity, chastity, and humility. Soon
Jill Lepore
#21. Americans like to get rich fast. That this means we go broke fast, too, is something that we have become very good at forgetting. Our ignorance of history is matched only by our unfailing optimism; it's actually part of our optimism.
Jill Lepore
#22. 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
#23. I always just wanted to be a writer, not necessarily a particular kind of writer.
Jill Lepore
#24. In Middle English, a frankeleyn is a free man, an owner of land but not of title: neither a serf nor a peasant but not a nobleman, either. There
Jill Lepore
#25. But everyone tries; trying is the human condition. All anyone can do is ask.
Jill Lepore
#26. Many a Man would have been worse, if his Estate had been better.19
Jill Lepore
#27. 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
#28. The idea of innovation is the idea of progress stripped of the aspirations of the Enlightenment, scrubbed clean of the horrors of the twentieth century, and relieved of its critics.
Jill Lepore
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. She was curious, and she could be untoward. But she was dutiful. She was pared to fit.
Jill Lepore
#34. 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
#35. Since childhood, I wrote a lot of fiction, a lot of stories, but I most loved writing essays.
Jill Lepore
#36. History is a long and endlessly interesting argument, where evidence is everything and storytelling is everything else.
Jill Lepore
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. That people so often believe themselves to be right is no proof that they are.
Jill Lepore
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. Accepting money from the federal government to conduct research places academic inquiry in the service of national interests.
Jill Lepore
#43. Americans, among the marryingest people in the world, are also the divorcingest.
Jill Lepore
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. A girl's apprenticeship was girlhood itself. A
Jill Lepore
#47. Republicans were more pro-choice than Democrats up until the late 1980s.
Jill Lepore
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. The virtue she valued most was faith. It had no place on Franklin's list. She placed her trust in Providence. He placed his faith in man.
Jill Lepore
#51. The world may not be getting better and better, but our devices are getting newer and newer.
Jill Lepore
#52. 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
#53. 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
#55. Scientific management promised to replace rules of thumb with accurate measurements.
Jill Lepore
#56. 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
#57. I would not have you for to think that I am such a Fool, To write against Learning, as such, or to cry down a School. Still, it would always be an error to count School Learning best.
Jill Lepore
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. '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
#61. 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
#62. Secrecy is what is known, but not to everyone. Privacy is what allows us to keep what we know to ourselves.
Jill Lepore
#63. 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.
Jill Lepore
#64. Nineteenth-century grass-roots populism made twentieth-century progressivism possible.
Jill Lepore
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. When business became big business - conglomerates employing hundreds and even thousands of people - companies divided themselves into still smaller units.
Jill Lepore
#68. One Half of the World does not know how the other Half lives, Franklin once wrote. His sister is his other Half.
Jill Lepore
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. We have hands that must work, brains that must think, and personalities that must be developed.
Jill Lepore
#72. By the Collision of different Sentiments," Franklin wrote, "Sparks of Truth are struck out, and political Light is obtained.
Jill Lepore
#73. 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
#75. He took the trouble to offer "a few gentle Reproofs on those who deserve them," including Harvard students.
Jill Lepore
#76. 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
#77. Old reference books are like tree rings. Without them, there'd be no way to know what a tree had lived through.
Jill Lepore
#78. 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
#79. He eyed his class of Harvard men sternly. "Girls are also human beings," he told them, "a point often overlooked!!"17
Jill Lepore
#80. 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
#81. All feminists are suffragists, but not all suffragists are feminists, as one feminist explained.
Jill Lepore
#82. 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
#83. Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world. - William Moulton Marston, March 1945
Jill Lepore
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. Massachusetts's poor laws required that boys be taught to write and girls to read.7
Jill Lepore
#87. 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
#88. Democracy is difficult and demanding. So is history. It can crack your voice; it can stir your soul; it can break your heart.
Jill Lepore
#90. Fiction is the history of the obscure.
Jill Lepore
#91. 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
#92. 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.
Jill Lepore
#93. The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesn't enter into it.
Jill Lepore
#94. Epidemics follow patterns because diseases follow patterns. Viruses spread; they reproduce; they die.
Jill Lepore
#95. 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
#96. Damning taxes is a piece of cake. It's defending them that's hard.
Jill Lepore
#97. Reviewing a book written by someone you're living with and sleeping with is, needless to say, wrong.
Jill Lepore
#98. Desktop computers - boxes inside boxes - began appearing in those cubicles in the mid-eighties, electrical cords curling on the floor like so many ropes.
Jill Lepore
#99. 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
#100. Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.
Jill Lepore
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