Jill Lepore Quotes

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Jill Lepore

Profession : Historian

Birth : August 27, 1966

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

Jill Lepore

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

Jill Lepore

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.

Jill Lepore

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

Jill Lepore

History is only written from what remains.

Jill Lepore

In kindergarten, you can learn how to be a citizen of the world.

Jill Lepore

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

Jill Lepore

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.

Jill Lepore

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.

Jill Lepore

In the trunk of her car, my mother used to keep a collapsible easel, a clutch of brushes, a little wooden case stocked with tubes of paint, and, tucked into the spare-tire well, one of my father's old, tobacco-stained shirts, for a smock.

Jill Lepore

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.

Jill Lepore

A problem with a president who leads by stirring the moral sentiments of voters is that he has got to keep stirring them.

Jill Lepore

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

Jill Lepore

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

Jill Lepore

In antihistory, time is an illusion.

Jill Lepore

In the last years of the nineteen-eighties, I worked not at startups but at what might be called finish-downs. Tech companies that were dying would hire temps - college students and new graduates - to do what little was left of the work of the employees they'd laid off.

Jill Lepore

Theories of history used to be supernatural: the divine ruled time; the hand of God, a special providence, lay behind the fall of each sparrow. If the present differed from the past, it was usually worse: supernatural theories of history tend to involve decline, a fall from grace, the loss of God's favor, corruption.

Jill Lepore

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.

Jill Lepore

No nation has a single history, no people a single song.

Jill Lepore

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

Jill Lepore