Jill Lepore
Jill Lepore
Jill Leporeis an American historian. She is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University. and a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she has contributed since 2005. She writes about American history, law, literature, and politics...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionHistorian
CountryUnited States of America
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When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood NOT as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.
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Desktop computers - boxes inside boxes - began appearing in those cubicles in the mid-eighties, electrical cords curling on the floor like so many ropes.
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Democracy is difficult and demanding. So is history. It can crack your voice; it can stir your soul; it can break your heart.
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Damning taxes is a piece of cake. It's defending them that's hard.
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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.
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Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, for modernity, and for prosperity. The wealthy pay more because they have benefitted more.
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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.
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Accepting money from the federal government to conduct research places academic inquiry in the service of national interests.
history people single
No nation has a single history, no people a single song.
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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.
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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.
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The idea that debt is necessary for trade, and has to be forgiven, is consequent to the rise of a market economy. The idea that debt is wrong and should be punished is a feature of a moral economy.
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The idea of progress - the notion that human history is the history of human betterment - dominated the world view of the West between the Enlightenment and the First World War.
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A mystery, in Christian theology, is what God knows and man cannot, and must instead believe.