‘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. – Jill Lepore
Desktop computers – boxes inside boxes – began appearing in those cubicles in the mid-eighties, electrical cords curling on the floor like so many ropes. – Jill Lepore
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. – Jill Lepore
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. – Jill Lepore
Throughout the nineteen-seventies and eighties, especially during periods of recession, employees were moved from offices to cubicles. – Jill Lepore
Fox News’s coverage of 9/11 and the war in Iraq improved its ratings, demonstrated its influence, and intensified the controversy over its practices. – Jill Lepore
Presidential biography is, by its nature, out of scale; no character is bigger, no action greater, than the person and the doings of the American president. – Jill Lepore
My mother liked to command me to do things I found scary. I always wanted to stay home and read. My mother only ever wanted me to get away. – Jill Lepore
In the nineteen-thirties, one in four Americans got their news from William Randolph Hearst, who lived in a castle and owned twenty-eight newspapers in nineteen cities. – Jill Lepore
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 usually worse: supernatural theories of history tend to involve decline, a fall from grace, the loss of God’s favor, corruption. – Jill Lepore
Since childhood, I wrote a lot of fiction, a lot of stories, but I most loved writing essays. – Jill Lepore
Mainly, the more faddish and newer stages of life are really just marketing schemes. Tweenhood. The young old. The quarter-life crisis. You can sell a lot of junk to a lot of people by inventing a stage of life and giving it a name. – Jill Lepore
An ordinary life used to look something like this: born into a growing family, you help rear your siblings, have the first of your own half-dozen or even dozen children soon after you’re grown, and die before your youngest has left home. – Jill Lepore
The Karen Ann Quinlan case is where the right to life and the right to die got bound together, and I don’t think they’ve ever gotten untangled. – Jill Lepore
Mainly, the more faddish and newer stages of life are really just marketing schemes. Tweenhood. The young old. The quarter-life crisis. – Jill Lepore
One day, I was playing ‘The Game of Life,’ the board game, with a mess of kids, and I wasn’t quite sure how, but it seemed different than the game I remembered playing as a kid. So I bought an old game, from 1960, and it was different. – Jill Lepore
