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. View quote
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. View quote
Jill Lepore
Mainly, the more faddish and newer stages of life are really just marketing schemes. Tweenhood. The young old. The quarter-life crisis. View quote
Jill Lepore
Germ theory, which secularized infectious disease, had a side effect: it sacralized epidemiology. View quote
Jill Lepore
Conservatism cherishes tradition; innovation fetishizes novelty. They tug in different directions, the one toward the past, the other toward the future. View quote
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. View quote
Jill Lepore
Nineteenth-century grass-roots populism made twentieth-century progressivism possible. View quote
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. View quote
Jill Lepore
In antihistory, time is an illusion. View quote
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. View quote
Jill Lepore
Old reference books are like tree rings. Without them, there'd be no way to know what a tree had lived through. View quote
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. View quote
Jill Lepore
The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesn't enter into it. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Jill Lepore

Jill Lepore

Jill Lepore - Image
Occupation: American Historian
Born: August 27, 1966
Quotes count: 17