Jill Lepore quotes

In kindergarten, you can learn how to be a citizen of the world. (Jill Lepore)

Epidemics follow patterns because diseases follow patterns. Viruses spread; they reproduce; they die.

Jill Lepore

History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what do do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from.

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

Germ theory, which secularized infectious disease, had a side effect: it sacralized epidemiology.

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

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

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

Jill Lepore

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.

Jill Lepore

In antihistory, time is an illusion.

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)

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

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

Jill Lepore

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.

Jill Lepore

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

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

Epidemiologists study patterns in order to combat infection. Stories about epidemics follow patterns, too. Stories arent often deadly, but they can be virulent: spreading fast, weakening resistance, wreaking havoc.

Jill Lepore