Jill Lepore

“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.”

“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.”

“Scientific management promised to replace rules of thumb with accurate measurements.”

“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.”

“Old reference books are like tree rings. Without them, there'd be no way to know what a tree had lived through.”

“When business became big business - conglomerates employing hundreds and even thousands of people - companies divided themselves into still smaller units.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Mainly, the more faddish and newer stages of life are really just marketing schemes. Tweenhood. The young old. The quarter-life crisis.”

“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.”

“Secrecy is what is known, but not to everyone. Privacy is what allows us to keep what we know to ourselves.”

“And that's the point! Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force strength power. Not wanting to be girls, they don't want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women's strong qualities have become despised because of their week ones.”

“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.”

“Democracy is difficult and demanding. So is history. It can crack your voice; it can stir your soul; it can break your heart.”

“'Doctor Who' began as family television: a show that kids and their parents and grandparents can all watch, maybe even together, on the sofa.”

“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.”

“'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.”

“We have hands that must work, brains that must think, and personalities that must be developed.”

“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.”

“Few American presidents have been unhappier or lonelier in office than Woodrow Wilson.”