Jill Lepore

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

“History's written from what can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by earth.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“'Doctor Who' is, unavoidably, a product of mid-twentieth-century debates about Britain's role in the world as its empire unravelled.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“History is only written from what remains.”

“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.”

“Presidential biography is, by its nature, out of scale; no character is bigger, no action greater, than the person and the doings of the American president.”

“Since childhood, I wrote a lot of fiction, a lot of stories, but I most loved writing essays.”

“Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, for modernity, and for prosperity. The wealthy pay more because they have benefitted more.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.”

“Desktop computers - boxes inside boxes - began appearing in those cubicles in the mid-eighties, electrical cords curling on the floor like so many ropes.”

“Mary Woolley wasn't only a suffragist; she was also a feminist. "Feminism is not a prejudice," she said, "It is a principle.”

“Why do beautiful women love ugly men?”