Jill Lepore Quotes

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.

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

The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesnt enter into it.

History is a long and endlessly interesting argument, where evidence is everything and storytelling is everything else.

Why do beautiful women love ugly men?

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.

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

Germ theory, which secularized infectious disease, had a side effect: it sacralized epidemiology.

Folklore used to be passed by word of mouth, from one generation to the next; thats what makes it folklore, as opposed to, say, history, which is written down and stored in an archive.

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

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

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

You can be strong as any boy if you'll work hard and train yourself in athletics, the way boys do.

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

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

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

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

Disrupt, and you will be saved.

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.

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

In antihistory, time is an illusion.

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

Modern political science started in the late nineteenth century as a branch of history.

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

Replacing “progress” with “innovation” skirts the question of whether a novelty is an improvement: the world may not be getting better and better but our devices are getting newer and newer.

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.