Top 40 Jill Lepore Quotes

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.

‘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 antihistory, time is an illusion.

Mainly, the more faddish and newer stages of life are really just marketing schemes. Tweenhood. The young old. The quarter-life crisis.

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

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.

Desktop computers – boxes inside boxes – began appearing in those cubicles in the mid-eighties, electrical cords curling on the floor like so many ropes.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

If you know a lot about something and apply that information to a vote that matches your policy preferences, your opinion quality is high.

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

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

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.

Democracy is difficult and demanding. So is history. It can crack your voice; it can stir your soul; it can break your heart.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Theories of history used to be supernatural: the divine ruled time; the hand of God, a special providence, lay behind the fall of each sparrow. If the present differed from the past, it was usually worse: supernatural theories of history tend to involve decline, a fall from grace, the loss of God’s favor, corruption.

‘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.

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.

Clarence Darrow, America’s best-known trial lawyer, was also one of American history’s most skilled orators.

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.

Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, for modernity, and for prosperity. The wealthy pay more because they have benefitted more.

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.

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.

History’s written from what can be found; what isn’t saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by earth.

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.

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

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

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.