Top 90 Jill Lepore Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “It has often been said, in the twenty-first century and in earlier centuries, too, that Americans lack a shared past and that, built on a cracked foundation, the Republic is crumbling.”

— Jill Lepore

52. “All feminists are suffragists, but not all suffragists are feminists,” as one feminist explained.”

— Jill Lepore

53. “We have hands that must work, brains that must think, and personalities that must be developed.”

— Jill Lepore

54. “Wonder Woman left Paradise Island to fight fascism with feminism.”

— Jill Lepore

55. “Girls are also human beings, a point often overlooked.”

— Jill Lepore

56. “I have often thought of it as one of the most barbarous Customs in the world, considering us as a Civilised and a Christian Countrey, that we deny the advantages of Learning to Women.” Like.”

— Jill Lepore

57. “The “basis of Feminism,” Sanger said, had to be a woman’s control over her own body, “the right to be a mother regardless of church or state.”15.”

— Jill Lepore

58. “That the revival of Christianity coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration, an anniversary made all the more mystical when the news spread that both Jefferson and Adams had died that very day, July 4, 1826, as if by the hand of God, meant that the Declaration itself took on a religious cast. The self-evident, secular truths of the Declaration of Independence became, to evangelical Americans, the truths of revealed religion.”

— Jill Lepore

59. “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.”

— Jill Lepore

60. “Before the revival began, a scant one in ten Americans were church members; by the time it ended, that ratio had risen to eight in ten.”

— Jill Lepore

61. “Nineteenth-century grass-roots populism made twentieth-century progressivism possible.”

— Jill Lepore

62. “The only way to answer the question “Are things getting better or are they getting worse?” is to discover whether modern man knows more or is wiser than his ancestors, Weaver argued. And his answer to this question was no. With the scientific revolution, “facts” – particular explanations for how the world works – had replaced “truth” – a general understanding of the meaning of its existence.”

— Jill Lepore

63. “Between 1900 and 1930, the percentage of PhDs awarded to women doubled, and then, for three decades, it fell.6 The gains made by women in the beginning of the twentieth century were lost, everywhere, as women who had fought their way into colleges and graduate programs found that they were barred from the top ranks of the academy. No structural changes had been made that would have allowed women to pursue a life of the mind while raising children: many quit; many were kicked out; most gave up.”

— Jill Lepore

64. “Superman first bounded over tall buildings in 1938. Batman began lurking in the shadows in 1939. Wonder Woman landed in her invisible plane in 1941.”

— Jill Lepore

65. “Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice,” Montaigne observed.”

— Jill Lepore

66. “Feminists in Greenwich Village had begun bobbing their hair in 1912. In 1915, it was still radical. “The idea, it seems, came from Russia,” the New York Times reported. “The intellectual women of that country were revolutionaries. For convenience in disguising themselves when the police trailed them, they cropped their hair.”2 Holloway was something of a revolutionary, too.”

— Jill Lepore

67. “In 1934, after Upton Sinclair was defeated in his campaign to become the next governor of California, he labeled the advertising concern that defeated him a “lie factory.” Marston took much the same view. One of Wonder Woman’s most sinister adversaries, the Duke of Deception, runs an advertising firm called the Lie Factory.”

— Jill Lepore

68. “The last peace had created the conditions for the next war. Out of want came fear, out of fear came fury.”

— Jill Lepore

69. “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.”

— Jill Lepore

70. “The only difference between the Church of Rome and the Church of England, Franklin joked, is that the former is infallible while the latter is never in the wrong.”

— Jill Lepore

71. “Contrary to popular belief,” he began, “every normal person is both male and female in some degree.” What he called “erotic emotions” are felt by all people, toward virtually all other people. The problem is that “people not trained to an analytical point of view fail to consider these more complex expressions of erotic feeling,” and tend to regard them as abnormal.”

— Jill Lepore

72. “Between 1941 and 1946, the federal government spent more than it had from 1789 to 1941.”

— Jill Lepore

73. “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.”

— Jill Lepore

74. “He eyed his class of Harvard men sternly. “Girls are also human beings,” he told them, “a point often overlooked!!”17.”

— Jill Lepore

75. “Between 1910 and 1920, the percentage of married women who worked had nearly doubled, and the number of married women in the professions had risen by 40 percent, Collier noted. “The question, therefore, is no longer, should women combine marriage with careers, but how?”23.”

— Jill Lepore

76. “To write something down is to make a fossil record of a mind.”

— Jill Lepore

77. “Before 1492, Europe suffered from scarcity and famine. After 1492, the vast wealth carried to Europe from the Americas and extracted by the forced labor of Africans granted governments new powers that contributed to the rise of nation-states.”

— Jill Lepore

78. “Marston liked to say that Wonder Woman was meant to be “psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who, I believe, should rule the world,” but neither he nor Gaines seem to have given much thought to hiring a woman to draw her.”

— Jill Lepore

79. “In 1880, clerks made up less than 5 percent of the nation’s workforce, nearly all of them men; by 1910, more than four million Americans worked in offices, and half were women. By 1920, most Americans lived and worked in cities.”

— Jill Lepore

80. “Lange, who had been stricken by polio at the age of seven and walked with a painful limp, had become famous for the achingly sympathetic photographs she’d taken for the Farm Security Administration during the Depression. “Cripples know about each other,” she said of her ability to capture suffering on film.”

— Jill Lepore

81. “To love this particular nation is to love the world. This paradox lies within all forms of liberal nationalism. A liberal nation is a nation to which anyone who affirms its civic ideals belongs.”

— Jill Lepore

82. “In 1937, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black would observe, with grim dismay, that, over the course of fifty years, “only one half of one percent of the Fourteenth Amendment cases that came before the court had anything to do with African Americans or former slaves, while over half of the cases were about protecting the rights of corporations.”

— Jill Lepore

83. “Hours before Washington’s inauguration was scheduled to take place, a special congressional committee decided that it might be fitting for the president to rest his hand on a Bible while taking the oath of office. Unfortunately, no one in Federal Hall had a copy of the Bible on hand. There followed a mad dash to find one.”

— Jill Lepore

84. “Oliver Wendell Holmes said Lippmann’s pieces were like flypaper: “If I touch it, I am stuck till I finish it.”

— Jill Lepore

85. “In the primitive simplicity of their minds they are more easily victimized by a large than by a small lie, since they sometimes tell petty lies themselves but would be ashamed to tell big ones.”

— Jill Lepore

86. “Is progress the progress of Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan’s 1678 allegory – the journey of a Christian from sin to salvation? Is progress the extension of suffrage, the spread of democracy? Or is progress invention, the invention of new machines?”

— Jill Lepore

87. “It would become politically expedient, after the war, for ex-Confederates to insist that the Confederacy was founded on states’ rights. But the Confederacy was founded on white supremacy.”

— Jill Lepore

88. “The past is what’s written down. It is very quiet; only people who can write make any sound at all.”

— Jill Lepore

89. “Jewish refugees trying to flee to the United States found themselves blocked by a grotesque paradox: Nazi law mandated that no Jew could take more than four dollars out of the country; American immigration laws banned anyone “likely to become a public charge.”

— Jill Lepore

90. “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.”

— Jill Lepore