180 Quotes by Jill Lepore

Mary Woolley wasn't only a suffragist; she was also a feminist. "Feminism is not a prejudice," she said, "It is a principle.

Jane Francklyne, born in 1565, had lived for less than a month. She left very little behind. She was buried in the Ecton churchyard, but her father would hardly have paid a carver to engrave so small a stone. If not for the parish register, there would be no record that this Jane Francklyne had ever lived at all. History is what is written and can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by the earth.

There have always been those who argued that the end justifies the means, that the means aren’t really important,” [King] said. “But we will never have peace in the world until men everywhere recognize the ends are not cut off from the means, because the means represent the ideal in the making, and the end in the process, and ultimately you can’t reach good ends through evil means, because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree.

Throughout the nineteen-seventies and eighties, especially during periods of recession, employees were moved from offices to cubicles.

When I was a kid, my father would go to our school in the summer to sweep, mop, and wax the floors, room by room, hall by hall, week after week.

Secret government programs that pry into people's private affairs are bound up with ideas about secrecy and privacy that arose during the process by which the mysterious became secular.

Secrecy is what is known, but not to everyone. Privacy is what allows us to keep what we know to ourselves.

Since childhood, I wrote a lot of fiction, a lot of stories, but I most loved writing essays.

Modern political science started in the late nineteenth century as a branch of history.