180 Quotes by Jill Lepore

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.

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.

A mystery, in Christian theology, is what God knows and man cannot, and must instead believe.

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

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

To study the past is to unlock the prison of the present.

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.

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.

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.