Americans like to get rich fast. That this means we go broke fast, too, is something that we have become very good at forgetting. Our ignorance of history is matched only by our unfailing optimism; it’s actually part of our optimism. Jill Lepore Read Quote
The idea that debt is necessary for trade, and has to be forgiven, is consequent to the rise of a market economy. The idea that debt is wrong and should be punished is a feature of a moral economy. Jill Lepore Read Quote
As many as two out of every three Europeans who came to the colonies were debtors on arrival: they paid for their passage by becoming indentured servants. Jill Lepore Read Quote
We have discharged one generation of debtors after another, but we do not find that their numbers lessen. We find only that we forget, when times are good, that times were ever bad. Jill Lepore Read Quote
Germ theory, which secularized infectious disease, had a side effect: it sacralized epidemiology. Jill Lepore Read Quote
Historians once assumed that when childhood mortality was high, people must not have loved their children very much; it would have been too painful. Research has since proved that assumption wrong. Jill Lepore Read Quote
Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, for modernity, and for prosperity. The wealthy pay more because they have benefitted more. Jill Lepore Read Quote
A problem with a president who leads by stirring the moral sentiments of voters is that he has got to keep stirring them. Jill Lepore Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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. Jill Lepore Read Quote
