‘Doctor Who’ is, unavoidably, a product of mid-twentieth-century debates about Britain’s role in the world as its empire unravelled. – Jill Lepore
History’s written from what can be found; what isn’t saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by earth. – Jill Lepore
A mystery, in Christian theology, is what God knows and man cannot, and must instead believe. – 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
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
Accepting money from the federal government to conduct research places academic inquiry in the service of national interests. – 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
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
When business became big business – conglomerates employing hundreds and even thousands of people – companies divided themselves into still smaller units. – 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
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
The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesn’t enter into it. – 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
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
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
Secrecy is what is known, but not to everyone. Privacy is what allows us to keep what we know to ourselves. – Jill Lepore
Modern political science started in the late nineteenth century as a branch of history. – 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
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
Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, for modernity, and for prosperity. The wealthy pay more because they have benefitted more. – 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
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
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
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
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
