Jill Lepore Quotes

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Jill Lepore

Profession : Historian

Birth : August 27, 1966

Throughout the nineteen-seventies and eighties, especially during periods of recession, employees were moved from offices to cubicles.

Jill Lepore

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 Olympics is an imperfect interregnum, the parade of nations a fantasy about a peace never won. It offers little relief from strife and no harbor from terror.

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.

Jill Lepore

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.

Jill Lepore

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.

Jill Lepore

I always just wanted to be a writer, not necessarily a particular kind of writer.

Jill Lepore

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

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

My grandmother, who taught me how to cook, didn't know how to read.

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

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

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

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

In 2010, one in four Americans got the news from Fox News.

Jill Lepore

Fox News's coverage of 9/11 and the war in Iraq improved its ratings, demonstrated its influence, and intensified the controversy over its practices.

Jill Lepore

Well-reported news is a public good; bad news is bad for everyone.

Jill Lepore

Modern political science started in the late nineteenth century as a branch of history.

Jill Lepore

Political elites vote in a more partisan fashion than the mass public; this tendency, too, follows a curve. The more you know, the more likely you are to vote in an ideologically consistent way, not just following your party but following a set of constraints dictated by a political ideology.

Jill Lepore

If you know a lot about something and apply that information to a vote that matches your policy preferences, your opinion quality is high.

Jill Lepore