180 Quotes by Jill Lepore

As with the factory, so with the office: in an assembly line, the smaller the piece of work assigned to any single individual, the less skill it requires, and the less likely the possibility that doing it well will lead to doing something more interesting and better paid.

Accepting money from the federal government to conduct research places academic inquiry in the service of national interests.

Desktop computers - boxes inside boxes - began appearing in those cubicles in the mid-eighties, electrical cords curling on the floor like so many ropes.

Democracy is difficult and demanding. So is history. It can crack your voice; it can stir your soul; it can break your heart.

Damning taxes is a piece of cake. It's defending them that's hard.

Taxes, well laid and well spent, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare. Taxes protect property and the environment; taxes make business possible. Taxes pay for roads and schools and bridges and police and teachers. Taxes pay for doctors and nursing homes and medicine.

Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, for modernity, and for prosperity. The wealthy pay more because they have benefitted more.

No nation has a single history, no people a single song.

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 from my mother's house.