Jill Lepore Quotes
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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.
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Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.
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'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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Modern political science started in the late nineteenth century as a branch of history.
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Damning taxes is a piece of cake. It's defending them that's hard.
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I always just wanted to be a writer, not necessarily a particular kind of writer.
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Throughout the nineteen-seventies and eighties, especially during periods of recession, employees were moved from offices to cubicles.
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History's written from what can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by earth.
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Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, for modernity, and for prosperity. The wealthy pay more because they have benefitted more.
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My grandmother, who taught me how to cook, didn't know how to read.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A mystery, in Christian theology, is what God knows and man cannot, and must instead believe.
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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.
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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.
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Secrecy is what is known, but not to everyone. Privacy is what allows us to keep what we know to ourselves.
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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.
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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.