Jill Lepore

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

“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 f...”

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

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

“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.”

“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...”

“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.”

“A problem with a president who leads by stirring the moral sentiments of voters is that he has got to keep stirring them.”

“'Doctor Who' is the most original science-fiction television series ever made. It is also one of the longest-running television shows of all time.”