Jill Lepore Quotes
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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If you know a lot about something and apply that information to a vote that matches your policy preferences, your opinion quality is high.
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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.
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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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Modern political science started in the late nineteenth century as a branch of history.
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Scientific management promised to replace rules of thumb with accurate measurements.
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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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Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.
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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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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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My grandmother, who taught me how to cook, didn't know how to read.
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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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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.
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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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Damning taxes is a piece of cake. It's defending them that's hard.
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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.
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A mystery, in Christian theology, is what God knows and man cannot, and must instead believe.
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Epidemics follow patterns because diseases follow patterns. Viruses spread; they reproduce; they die.