Jill Lepore
14 quotes
Biography
Jill Lepore is an American historian and journalist. 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.
"I never set out to study history. I only ever set out to write."
"Many of the essays engage with the question of written constitutionalism in the United States, meaning, in a specific legal way, that we are ruled by the dead. But a lot of the essays also engage broadly in questions about how memory and devotion and obligation to the dead inform decisions that we make. I don’t think it’s an unshakable hold. And sometimes, as in the title essay (from 2019), that hold is an embrace."
"The work of the historian is not the work of the critic or of the moralist,”. “It is the work of the sleuth and the storyteller, the philosopher and the scientist, the keeper of tales, the sayer of sooth, the teller of truth."
"A great deal of what many Americans hold dear is nowhere written on those four pages of parchment, or in any of the amendments. What has made the Constitution durable is the same as what makes it demanding: the fact that so much was left out."
"The Constitution is ink on parchment. It is forty-four hundred words. And it is, too, the accreted set of meanings that have been made of those words, the amendments, the failed amendments, the struggles, the debates—the course of events—over more than two centuries. It is not easy, but it is everyone’s."
"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."
"And that's the point; not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don't want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women's strong qualities have become despised because of their week ones."
"And that's the point! Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force strength power. Not wanting to be girls, they don't want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women's strong qualities have become despised because of their week ones."
"Replacing “progress” with “innovation” skirts the question of whether a novelty is an improvement: the world may not be getting better and better but our devices are getting newer and newer."
"We have hands that must work, brains that must think, and personalities that must be developed."
"Modern political science started in the late nineteenth century as a branch of history."
"The idea of innovation is the idea of progress stripped of the aspirations of the Enlightenment, scrubbed clean of the horrors of the twentieth century, and relieved of its critics."
"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."
"The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesn't enter into it."