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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.
Jill Lepore -
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
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Well-reported news is a public good; bad news is bad for everyone.
Jill Lepore -
History's written from what can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by earth.
Jill Lepore -
Damning taxes is a piece of cake. It's defending them that's hard.
Jill Lepore -
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 -
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 -
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
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Conservatism cherishes tradition; innovation fetishizes novelty. They tug in different directions, the one toward the past, the other toward the future.
Jill Lepore -
Modern political science started in the late nineteenth century as a branch of history.
Jill Lepore -
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 -
I always just wanted to be a writer, not necessarily a particular kind of writer.
Jill Lepore -
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 -
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
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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 -
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.
Jill Lepore -
A mystery, in Christian theology, is what God knows and man cannot, and must instead believe.
Jill Lepore -
Throughout the nineteen-seventies and eighties, especially during periods of recession, employees were moved from offices to cubicles.
Jill Lepore -
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.
Jill Lepore -
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
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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 -
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 -
My grandmother, who taught me how to cook, didn't know how to read.
Jill Lepore -
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