Quotes from Jill Lepore

The work of the historian is not the work of the critic or of the moralist; it is the work of the sleuth and the storyteller, the philosopher and the scientist, the keeper of tales, the sayer of sooth, the teller of truth.

You can be strong as any boy if you'll work hard and train yourself in athletics, the way boys do.

That the revival of Christianity coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration, an anniversary made all the more mystical when the news spread that both Jefferson and Adams had died that very day, July 4, 1826, as if by the hand of God, meant that the Declaration itself took on a religious cast. The self-evident, secular truths of the Declaration of Independence became, to evangelical Americans, the truths of revealed religion.

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

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

Epidemics follow patterns because diseases follow patterns. Viruses spread; they reproduce; they die.

My mother married my father in 1956. She was twenty-eight, and he was thirty-one. She loved him with a fierce steadiness borne of loyalty, determination, and an unyielding dignity.