Top 90 Jill Lepore Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Disrupt, and you will be saved.”

— Jill Lepore

2. “Why do beautiful women love ugly men?”

— Jill Lepore

3. “History is a long and endlessly interesting argument, where evidence is everything and storytelling is everything else.”

— Jill Lepore

4. “The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesnt enter into it.”

— Jill Lepore

5. “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

6. “To study the past is to unlock the prison of the present.”

— Jill Lepore

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

— Jill Lepore

8. “History isn’t only a subject; it’s also a method. My method is, generally, to let the dead speak for themselves. I’ve pressed their words between these pages, like flowers, for their beauty, or like insects, for their hideousness. 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.”

— Jill Lepore

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

— Jill Lepore

10. “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.”

— Jill Lepore

11. “We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. – Abraham Lincoln, 1862.”

— Jill Lepore

12. “The Electoral College was a concession to slave owners, an affair of both mathematical and political calculation.”

— Jill Lepore

13. “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.”

— Jill Lepore

14. “In antihistory, time is an illusion.”

— Jill Lepore

15. “History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence. In the writing of history, a story without an argument fades into antiquarianism; an argument without a story risks pedantry. Writing history requires empathy, inquiry, and debate. It requires forswearing condescension, cant, and nostalgia. The past isn’t quaint. Much of it, in fact, is bleak.”

— Jill Lepore

16. “By the Collision of different Sentiments,” Franklin wrote, “Sparks of Truth are struck out, and political Light is obtained.”

— Jill Lepore

17. “The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden. It can’t be shirked. You carry it everywhere. There’s nothing for it but to get to know it.”

— Jill Lepore

18. “The great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right,” as Martin Luther King Jr. once said. The nation is often wrong. But so long as protest is possible, it can always be righted.”

— Jill Lepore

19. “You can be strong as any boy if you’ll work hard and train yourself in athletics, the way boys do.”

— Jill Lepore

20. “Right wrongs no man.”

— Jill Lepore

21. “Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world. – William Moulton Marston, March 1945.”

— Jill Lepore

22. “The fight for women’s rights hasn’t come in waves. Wonder Woman was a product of the suffragist, feminist, and birth control movements of the 1900s and 1910s and became a source of the women’s liberation and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The fight for women’s rights has been a river, wending.”

— Jill Lepore

23. “The world may not be getting better and better, but our devices are getting newer and newer.”

— Jill Lepore

24. “Wonder Woman didn’t begin in 1941 when William Moulton Marston turned in his first script to Sheldon Mayer. Wonder Woman began on a winter day in 1904 when Margaret Sanger dug Olive Byrne out of a snowbank.”

— Jill Lepore

25. “Thirteen million new homes were built in the United States during the 1950s; eleven million of them were built in the suburbs. Eighty-three percent of all population growth in the 1950s took place in the suburbs. For every two blacks who moved to the cities, three whites moved out. The postwar racial order created a segregated landscape: black cities, white suburbs.”

— Jill Lepore

26. “The omitting the Word will be regarded as an Endeavour to conceal a principle of which we are ashamed.”

— Jill Lepore

27. “All feminists are suffragists, but not all suffragists are feminists,” as one feminist explained. Feminists rejected the idea of women as reformers whose moral authority came from their differentness from men – women were supposedly, by nature, more tender and loving and chaste and pure – and advocated instead women’s full and equal participation in politics, work, and the arts, on the grounds that women were in every way equal to men.”

— Jill Lepore

28. “Barbarians are no more marvelous to us than we are to them, nor for better cause,” Montaigne wrote. “Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice.”

— Jill Lepore

29. “Mary Woolley wasn’t only a suffragist; she was also a feminist. “Feminism is not a prejudice,” she said, “It is a principle.”

— Jill Lepore

30. “Girls are important: “Remember that very few stories are of great interest without the rustle of a skirt.”

— Jill Lepore

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

— Jill Lepore

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

— Jill Lepore

33. “Folklore used to be passed by word of mouth, from one generation to the next; thats what makes it folklore, as opposed to, say, history, which is written down and stored in an archive.”

— Jill Lepore

34. “The United States rests on a dedication to equality, which is chiefly a moral idea, rooted in Christianity, but it rests, too, on a dedication to inquiry, fearless and unflinching. Its founders agreed with the Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume, who wrote, in 1748, that “Records of Wars, Intrigues, Factions, and Revolutions are so many Collections of Experiments.”9 They believed that truth is to be found in ideas about morality but also in the study of history.”

— Jill Lepore

35. “Theodore Roosevelt declared in 1908, “because when all is said and done it is the mother, and the mother only, who is a better citizen even than the soldier who fights for his country.”

— Jill Lepore

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

— Jill Lepore

37. “Reviewing a book written by someone you’re living with and sleeping with is, needless to say, wrong.”

— Jill Lepore

38. “A nation founded on the idea that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights and offering asylum to anyone suffering from persecution is a beacon to the world. This is America at its best: a nation that welcomes dissent, protects free speech, nurtures invention, and makes possible almost unbelievable growth and prosperity.”

— Jill Lepore

39. “Liberalism is still in there. The trick is getting it out. There’s only one way to do that. It requires grabbing and holding onto a very good idea: that all people are equal and endowed from birth with inalienable rights and entitled to equal treatment, guaranteed by a nation of laws. This requires making the case for the nation.”

— Jill Lepore

40. “The most ignorant young man, who knows nothing of the needs of women, thinks himself a competent legislator, because he is a man,” Pankhurst told the crowd, eyeing the Harvard men. “This aristocratic attitude is a mistake.”

— Jill Lepore

41. “Wonder Woman isn’t only an Amazonian princess with badass boots. She’s the missing link in a chain of events that begins with the woman suffrage campaigns of the 1910s and ends with the troubled place of feminism fully a century later. Feminism made Wonder Woman. And then Wonder Woman remade feminism...”

— Jill Lepore

42. “The virtue she valued most was faith. It had no place on Franklin’s list. She placed her trust in Providence. He placed his faith in man.”

— Jill Lepore

43. “He counted thirteen virtues: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquillity, chastity, and humility. Soon.”

— Jill Lepore

44. “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.”

— Jill Lepore

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

— Jill Lepore

46. “In one of the most wrenching tragedies in American history – a chronicle not lacking for tragedy – the Confederacy had lost the war, but it had won the peace.”

— Jill Lepore

47. “Republicans were more pro-choice than Democrats up until the late 1980s.”

— Jill Lepore

48. “For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.”

— Jill Lepore

49. “In 1885, an American economist tried to reckon the extraordinary transformation wrought by what was now 200,000 miles of railroad, more than in all of Europe. It was possible to move one ton of freight one mile for less than seven-tenths of one cent, “a sum so small,” he wrote, “that outside of China it would be difficult to find a coin of equivalent value to give a boy as a reward for carrying an ounce package across a street.”

— Jill Lepore

50. “No nation can be freer than its most oppressed, richer than its poorest, wiser than its most ignorant.”

— Jill Lepore