Top 100 Lepore Quotes

#1. I was always really fascinated with animation, but just in a way all kids are with watching Disney movies and all that, but I had no idea how animation was done.

Kirsten Lepore

#2. Disrupt, and you will be saved.

Jill Lepore

#3. He took the trouble to offer "a few gentle Reproofs on those who deserve them," including Harvard students.

Jill Lepore

#4. In antihistory, time is an illusion.

Jill Lepore

#5. 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

#6. By the Collision of different Sentiments," Franklin wrote, "Sparks of Truth are struck out, and political Light is obtained.

Jill Lepore

#7. We have hands that must work, brains that must think, and personalities that must be developed.

Jill Lepore

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. One Half of the World does not know how the other Half lives, Franklin once wrote. His sister is his other Half.

Jill Lepore

#11. When business became big business - conglomerates employing hundreds and even thousands of people - companies divided themselves into still smaller units.

Jill Lepore

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. The world may not be getting better and better, but our devices are getting newer and newer.

Jill Lepore

#15. It's just fun to be in Paris.

Nanette Lepore

#16. 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

#17. Secrecy is what is known, but not to everyone. Privacy is what allows us to keep what we know to ourselves.

Jill Lepore

#18. 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

#19. '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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. Scientific management promised to replace rules of thumb with accurate measurements.

Jill Lepore

#25. Why do beautiful women love ugly men?

Jill Lepore

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. Nineteenth-century grass-roots populism made twentieth-century progressivism possible.

Jill Lepore

#29. Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.

Jill Lepore

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. Reviewing a book written by someone you're living with and sleeping with is, needless to say, wrong.

Jill Lepore

#33. Damning taxes is a piece of cake. It's defending them that's hard.

Jill Lepore

#34. 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

#35. Epidemics follow patterns because diseases follow patterns. Viruses spread; they reproduce; they die.

Jill Lepore

#36. The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesn't enter into it.

Jill Lepore

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. Fiction is the history of the obscure.

Jill Lepore

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. Massachusetts's poor laws required that boys be taught to write and girls to read.7

Jill Lepore

#44. I love Hermes, Lanvin, Brunello Cucinelli, Reed Krakoff, Alice + Olivia and Nanette Lepore.

Kelly Rutherford

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. It's so easy for me to get caught up in the feeling of a city like Venice, where everything is just beautiful color and gorgeous buildings that are so peaceful. You can roam around and get lost in the labyrinth.

Nanette Lepore

#50. All feminists are suffragists, but not all suffragists are feminists, as one feminist explained.

Jill Lepore

#51. 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

#52. He eyed his class of Harvard men sternly. "Girls are also human beings," he told them, "a point often overlooked!!"17

Jill Lepore

#53. 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

#54. Old reference books are like tree rings. Without them, there'd be no way to know what a tree had lived through.

Jill Lepore

#55. That people so often believe themselves to be right is no proof that they are.

Jill Lepore

#56. But everyone tries; trying is the human condition. All anyone can do is ask.

Jill Lepore

#57. 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

#58. I really love to resurrect pieces from my past collections and wear them to fashion week parties.

Nanette Lepore

#59. I always just wanted to be a writer, not necessarily a particular kind of writer.

Jill Lepore

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. The Thirties are a great mix of everyday glamour and something a bit more practical.

Nanette Lepore

#63. He counted thirteen virtues: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquillity, chastity, and humility. Soon

Jill Lepore

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. When it comes to Fashion Week, I think it's time to hit a refresh.

Nanette Lepore

#67. I've always wanted to tackle the casual part of dressing. Knits to me are always just easy. I've fantasized about packing a suitcase of only knits: You just throw them in, roll them in a ball, pull them out and they still look fabulous.

Nanette Lepore

#68. A mystery, in Christian theology, is what God knows and man cannot, and must instead believe.

Jill Lepore

#69. Either hide this well or destroy it. It was the family motto.

Jill Lepore

#70. 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

#71. But sometimes even heroes have their flaws." NESS

Gabriella Lepore

#72. For me, one of my favorite parts of stop motion is not even the animating or the writing, but actually building. I always say that my favorite stage is just fabrication. It's just sitting on a workbench, making a little thing out of clay or whatever. That just totally excites me.

Kirsten Lepore

#73. Having animation as this time-based medium made a lot of sense for me, and then stop motion was even more fun because it was so hands-on and physical in a way that I really liked.

Kirsten Lepore

#74. '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

#75. 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

#76. Well-reported news is a public good; bad news is bad for everyone.

Jill Lepore

#77. In kindergarten, you can learn how to be a citizen of the world.

Jill Lepore

#78. I grew up camping with my family. We took so many trips. We had an RV, actually, when we were growing up. We did a ton of camping trips and went across the country.

Kirsten Lepore

#79. 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

#80. Conservatism cherishes tradition; innovation fetishizes novelty. They tug in different directions, the one toward the past, the other toward the future.

Jill Lepore

#81. every age has its folly

Jill Lepore

#82. 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

#83. In 2010, one in four Americans got the news from Fox News.

Jill Lepore

#84. 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

#85. 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

#86. Girls are important: Remember that very few stories are of great interest without the rustle of a skirt.

Jill Lepore

#87. No nation has a single history, no people a single song.

Jill Lepore

#88. 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

#89. 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

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. I played a lot of music all throughout my life, actually, but in high school I was in marching band and all the bands. So, I was big into music, I was big into drawing and sculpture, and all these different things.

Kirsten Lepore

#93. Republicans were more pro-choice than Democrats up until the late 1980s.

Jill Lepore

#94. A girl's apprenticeship was girlhood itself. A

Jill Lepore

#95. 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

#96. 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

#97. Americans, among the marryingest people in the world, are also the divorcingest.

Jill Lepore

#98. Accepting money from the federal government to conduct research places academic inquiry in the service of national interests.

Jill Lepore

#99. 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

#100. I think I would like to have lived in the 1930s and worn beautiful bias cut dresses all the time.

Nanette Lepore

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