Political elites vote in a more partisan fashion than the mass public; this tendency, too, follows a curve. The more you know, the more likely you are to vote in an ideologically consistent way, not just following your party but following a set of constraints dictated by a political ideology.

Jill Lepore

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

Jill Lepore

Political elites vote in a more partisan fashion than the mass public; this tendency, too, follows a curve. The more you know, the more likely you are to vote in an ideologically consistent way, not just following your party but following a set of constraints dictated by a political ideology.

Jill Lepore

In antihistory, time is an illusion.

Jill Lepore

Epidemiologists study patterns in order to combat infection. Stories about epidemics follow patterns, too. Stories aren't often deadly, but they can be virulent: spreading fast, weakening resistance, wreaking havoc.

Jill Lepore

Weirdly, there have been a lot of critics of conservatism, but very few critics of innovation. As a culture, we are deeply paranoid about politics, but we gaze upon innovation with rapturous adulation.

Jill Lepore

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.

Jill Lepore

History is only written from what remains.

Jill Lepore

History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what to do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from.

Jill Lepore

In 2010, one in four Americans got the news from Fox News.

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

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

Jill Lepore

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

Jill Lepore

Some people will always think they know how to make other people's marriages better, and, after a while, they'll get to cudgeling you or selling you something; the really entrepreneurial types will sell you the cudgel.

Jill Lepore

Book reviewing dates only to the eighteenth century, when, for the first time, there were so many books being printed that magazines - they were new, too - started printing essays about them.

Jill Lepore

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

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

In the trunk of her car, my mother used to keep a collapsible easel, a clutch of brushes, a little wooden case stocked with tubes of paint, and, tucked into the spare-tire well, one of my father's old, tobacco-stained shirts, for a smock.

Jill Lepore

Germ theory, which secularized infectious disease, had a side effect: it sacralized epidemiology.

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

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.

Jill Lepore