Replacing “progress” with “innovation” skirts whether a novelty is an improvement: the world may not be getting better and better, but our devices are getting newer and newer.

— Jill Lepore

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

— Jill Lepore

Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, for modernity, and for prosperity. The wealthy pay more because they have benefitted more. 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. During an emergency, like an earthquake or a hurricane, taxes pay for rescue workers, shelters, and services. For people whose lives are devastated by other kinds of disaster, like the disaster of poverty, taxes pay, even, for food.

— Jill Lepore

The Constitution is ink on parchment. It is forty-four hundred words. And it is, too, the accreted set of meanings that have been made of those words, the amendments, the failed amendments, the struggles, the debates—the course of events—over more than two centuries. It is not easy, but it is everyone’s.

— Jill Lepore

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.

— Jill Lepore

The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesn't enter into it.

— Jill Lepore

We have hands that must work, brains that must think, and personalities that must be developed.

— Jill Lepore

Why do beautiful women love ugly men?

— Jill Lepore

Wonder Woman didn't begin in 1941 when William Moulton Marston turned in his first script to Sheldon Mayer. Wonder Woman began on a winter day in 1904 when Margaret Sanger dug Olive Byrne out of a snowbank.

— Jill Lepore

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

— Jill Lepore