Quotes from Jill Lepore

but everyone tries; trying is the human condition. All anyone can do is ask.

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.

Wonder Woman left Paradise Island to fight fascism with feminism.

Contrary to popular belief," he began, "every normal person is both male and female in some degree." What he called "erotic emotions" are felt by all people, toward virtually all other people. The problem is that "people not trained to an analytical point of view fail to consider these more complex expressions of erotic feeling," and tend to regard them as abnormal.

Politics is a story about the relationship between the past and the future; history is a story about the relationship between the past and the present. It's what history and politics share - a vantage on the past - that makes writing the history of politics fraught. And it's what they don't share that makes the study of history vital. Politics is accountable to opinion; history is accountable to evidence.

In the end, the judge ruled that no woman has "the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception": if a woman isn't willing to die in childbirth, she shouldn't have sex. Sanger

Theodore Roosevelt declared in 1908, "because when all is said and done it is the mother, and the mother only, who is a better citizen even than the soldier who fights for his country.

Reviewing a book written by someone you're living with and sleeping with is, needless to say, wrong.

The historian, on the contrary, cannot experiment and can rarely observe. Instead, the historian has to collect his own evidence, knowing, all the while, that some of it is useless and much of it unreliable." -Professor Charles Homer Haskins

In July 1970, the Women's Liberation Basement Press, in Berkeley, California, launched an underground comic book called It Aint Me Babe. The cover of its first issue featured Wonder Woman marching in a rally protesting stock comic-book plots. Inside, Supergirl tells Superman to get lost, Veronica ditches Archie for Betty, Petunia Pig tells Porky Pig to cook his own dinner, and when Iggy tells Lulu "No girls allowed!" she has only one thing to say: "Fuck this shit!

History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence. In the writing of history, a story without an argument fades into antiquarianism; an argument without a story risks pedantry. Writing history requires empathy, inquiry, and debate. It requires forswearing condescension, cant, and nostalgia. The past isn't quaint. Much of it, in fact, is bleak.

A nation founded on the idea that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights and offering asylum to anyone suffering from persecution is a beacon to the world. This is America at its best: a nation that welcomes dissent, protects free speech, nurtures invention, and makes possible almost unbelievable growth and prosperity.

The great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right," as Martin Luther King Jr. once said. The nation is often wrong. But so long as protest is possible, it can always be righted.

We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. —Abraham Lincoln, 1862

Magazines were new. The Gentleman's Magazine—the first periodical called a "magazine"—appeared in London in 1731. It offered "a Monthly Collection, to treasure up, as in a Magazine, the most remarkable Pieces."3 The metaphor is to weapons. A magazine is, literally, an arsenal; a piece is a firearm.

The omitting the Word will be regarded as an Endeavour to conceal a principle of which we are ashamed.

the United States is founded on a set of ideas, but Americans have become so divided that they no longer agree, if they ever did, about what those ideas are, or were.

The idea of innovation is the idea of progress stripped of the aspirations of the Enlightenment, scrubbed clean of the horrors of the twentieth century, and relieved of its critics.

Between 1910 and 1920, the percentage of married women who worked had nearly doubled, and the number of married women in the professions had risen by 40 percent, Collier noted. "The question, therefore, is no longer, should women combine marriage with careers, but how?"23

Feminists in Greenwich Village had begun bobbing their hair in 1912. In 1915, it was still radical. "The idea, it seems, came from Russia," the New York Times reported. "The intellectual women of that country were revolutionaries. For convenience in disguising themselves when the police trailed them, they cropped their hair."2 Holloway was something of a revolutionary, too.

Hours before Washington's inauguration was scheduled to take place, a special congressional committee decided that it might be fitting for the president to rest his hand on a Bible while taking the oath of office. Unfortunately, no one in Federal Hall had a copy of the Bible on hand. There followed a mad dash to find one.

Barbarians are no more marvelous to us than we are to them, nor for better cause," Montaigne wrote. "Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice.

The Electoral College was a concession to slave owners, an affair of both mathematical and political calculation.

The last peace had created the conditions for the next war. Out of want came fear, out of fear came fury.