Jill Lepore Quotes

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Jill Lepore

Profession : Historian

Birth : August 27, 1966

Accepting money from the federal government to conduct research places academic inquiry in the service of national interests.

Jill Lepore

'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.

Jill Lepore

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

Jill Lepore

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

Jill Lepore

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

Jill Lepore

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.

Jill Lepore

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

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

As a matter of historical analysis, the relationship between secrecy and privacy can be stated in an axiom: the defense of privacy follows, and never precedes, the emergence of new technologies for the exposure of secrets.

Jill Lepore

A mystery, in Christian theology, is what God knows and man cannot, and must instead believe.

Jill Lepore

Damning taxes is a piece of cake. It's defending them that's hard.

Jill Lepore

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.

Jill Lepore

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

Jill Lepore

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

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

When I was a kid, my father would go to our school in the summer to sweep, mop, and wax the floors, room by room, hall by hall, week after week.

Jill Lepore

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

Jill Lepore

Conservatism cherishes tradition; innovation fetishizes novelty. They tug in different directions, the one toward the past, the other toward the future.

Jill Lepore

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.

Jill Lepore

Nineteenth-century grass-roots populism made twentieth-century progressivism possible.

Jill Lepore