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.

An ordinary life used to look something like this: born into a growing family, you help rear your siblings, have the first of your own half-dozen or even dozen children soon after you're grown, and die before your youngest has left home.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Americans, among the marryingest people in the world, are also the divorcingest.

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

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

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.

Americans like to get rich fast. That this means we go broke fast, too, is something that we have become very good at forgetting. Our ignorance of history is matched only by our unfailing optimism; it's actually part of our optimism.

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

History is only written from what remains.

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.

In kindergarten, you can learn how to be a citizen of the world.

Mainly, the more faddish and newer stages of life are really just marketing schemes. Tweenhood. The young old. The quarter-life crisis.

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.

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

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

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

Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.

When business became big business - conglomerates employing hundreds and even thousands of people - companies divided themselves into still smaller units.

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.