Quotes by Jill Lepore - Page 2

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 / Professor
Sister
Franklin
Frustrated
Always Face Me
Eighteenth
Eighteenth Century
Face Me Always
Likeness
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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 / Professor
Cities
Newspapers
Nineteen
Castle
William
Owned
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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 / Professor
Age
Adolescence
Citizens
Moving
Senior
Target
Useful
Life Is A
Plain
Senior Citizens
Stages
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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 / Professor
Buying
Might
Parental
Remedy
Almost
Almost Anything
Consumer
Easily
Deficiencies
Fathers
Group
Mothers
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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 / Professor
Betterment
Enlightenment
First World War
Human History
Notion
World View
Dominated
First World
The History Of
World War
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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 / Professor
Loyalty
Determination
Dignity
Mother
Steadiness
Borne
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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 / Professor
Debtors
Numbers
Lessen
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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.
Jill Lepore / Professor
Archives
Generations
Mouths
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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 / Professor
Folklore
Generation
Mouth
Opposed
Passed
Stored
Written Down
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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 / Professor
Government Programs
Mysterious
Privacy
Secrecy
Secular
Affairs
Programs
Pry
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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 / Professor
Essays
Magazines
Printed
Time New First Time
Dates
Eighteenth
Eighteenth Century
Reviewing
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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 / Professor
Defense
Littles
Self
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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 / Professor
Mortality
Assumed
Historians
Proved
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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 / Professor
Debt
Economy
Forgiven
Market Economy
Moral
Rise
Consequent
Feature
Market
Punished
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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 / Professor
Ancient
Crops
Labor
Livestock
Medieval
Monarchs
Taxes
Taxing
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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 / Professor
Homework
Ad
Women Woman Doing
Campaign
Footage
Produced
Table
Targeted
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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 / Professor
Adulation
Conservatism
Critics
Innovation
Deeply
Gaze
Weirdly
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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 / Professor
Journalism
Science Fiction
Date
Epidemic
Plots
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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.
Jill Lepore / Professor
Cherish
Hereditary
Next
Trying
Way
Choose
Inherit
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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 / Professor
Canvas
Died
Dozen
Granddaughter
Jane
Miles
Nine
Public Library
Aged
Basement
Portrait
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Epidemiologists study patterns in order to combat infection. Stories about epidemics follow patterns, too. Stories arent often deadly, but they can be virulent: spreading fast, weakening resistance, wreaking havoc.
Jill Lepore / Professor
Epidemics
Order
Stories
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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 / Professor
Combat
Havoc
Infection
Patterns
Resistance
Weakening
Deadly
Epidemic
Spreading
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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 / Professor
Compilation
Loan
Radio
Remember
Bbc
George
Orwell
Requests
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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 / Professor
Entrepreneurial
Selling
Better People Will
Better Always People
Marriages
Types
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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 / Professor
Analysis
Defense
Emergence
Exposure
Historical
Privacy
Secrecy
Axiom
Follows
New Technologies
Precedes
Secrets
Stated
Technologies
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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 / Professor
Crisis
Giving
Inventing
Junk
Life Crisis
Marketing
Schemes
Stage
Young
Life People Name
Sell
Mainly
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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 / Professor
Broke
Ignorance
Matched
Rich
Fast
Forgetting
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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 / Professor
Silly
Winter
Scoring
Skate
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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 / Professor
Mess
One Day
Remembered
Life Game Day
Board
Bought
Seemed
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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 / Professor
Dozen
Ordinary
Ordinary Life
Sibling
Life Family Home
Grown
Rear
Youngest
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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 / Professor
Brushes
Clutch
Paint
Shirts
Trunk
Wooden
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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 / Professor
Facts
Four
Pages
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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 / Professor
College
College Students
Dying
Graduates
Left
Might
Companies
Employees
Hire
Laid
Tech
Startups
Tech Companies
Worked
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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 / Professor
Assembly
Assembly Line
Possibility
Work Better Will
Factory
Requires
Single Individual
Skill
Smaller
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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 / Professor
Consistent
Constraints
Elites
Following
Ideology
Mass
Political Ideology
Vote
Curve
Dictated
Likely
Partisan
Tendency
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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.
Jill Lepore / Professor
History
Corruption
Decline
Divine
Fall
Grace
Loss
Providence
Used
Behind
Each
Favor
Hand
Involve
Lay
Present
Ruled
Sparrow
Supernatural
Tend
Theories
Worse
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Taxes, well laid and well spent, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare. Taxes protect property and the environment; taxes make business possible. Taxes pay for roads and schools and bridges and police and teachers. Taxes pay for doctors and nursing homes and medicine.
Jill Lepore / Professor
Bridges
Common
Defense
Doctors
Environment
General Welfare
Medicine
Nursing
Pay
Tranquility
Welfare
Teachers
General
Possible
Domestic
Homes
Insure
Laid
Promote
Provide
Roads
Schools
Spent
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History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence. In the writing of history, a story without an argument fades into antiquarianism; an argument without a story risks pedantry. Writing history requires empathy, inquiry, and debate. It requires forswearing condescension, cant, and nostalgia. The past isn’t quaint. Much of it, in fact, is bleak.
Jill Lepore / Professor
Art
Past
Writing
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Jane Francklyne, born in 1565, had lived for less than a month. She left very little behind. She was buried in the Ecton churchyard, but her father would hardly have paid a carver to engrave so small a stone. If not for the parish register, there would be no record that this Jane Francklyne had ever lived at all. History is what is written and can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by the earth.
Jill Lepore / Professor
Earth
Father
Records
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