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" Stages of life are artifacts. Adolescence is a useful contrivance, midlife is a moving target, senior citizens are an interest group, and tweenhood is just plain made up. "

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" As with the factory, so with the office: in an assembly line, the smaller the piece of work assigned to any single individual, the less skill it requires, and the less likely the possibility that doing it well will lead to doing something more interesting and better paid. "

Jill Lepore

Work

Better

Skill

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

" It feels silly to watch endless hours of winter sports every four years, when we never watch them any other time, and we don't even understand the rules, which doesn't stop us from scoring everyone, every run, every skate, every race. "

" When business became big business - conglomerates employing hundreds and even thousands of people - companies divided themselves into still smaller units. "

" Throughout the nineteen-seventies and eighties, especially during periods of recession, employees were moved from offices to cubicles. "

" Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror. "

" 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. "

" No nation has a single history, no people a single song. "

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

" Democracy is difficult and demanding. So is history. It can crack your voice; it can stir your soul; it can break your heart. "

" 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. "

" In kindergarten, you can learn how to be a citizen of the world. "

" Damning taxes is a piece of cake. It's defending them that's hard. "

" Theories of history used to be supernatural: the divine ruled time; the hand of God, a special providence, lay behind the fall of each sparrow. If the present differed from the past, it was usually worse: supernatural theories of history tend to involve decline, a fall from grace, the loss of God's favor, corruption. "

" The idea of progress - the notion that human history is the history of human betterment - dominated the world view of the West between the Enlightenment and the First World War. "

" In antihistory, time is an illusion. "

Jill Lepore

Time

Illusion

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

Jill Lepore

Everyone

Privacy

" Modern political science started in the late nineteenth century as a branch of history. "

" Mainly, the more faddish and newer stages of life are really just marketing schemes. Tweenhood. The young old. The quarter-life crisis. "

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

Jill Lepore

Die

Patterns

" 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. "

" As a matter of historical analysis, the relationship between secrecy and privacy can be stated in an axiom: the defense of privacy follows, and never precedes, the emergence of new technologies for the exposure of secrets. "

" Scientific management promised to replace rules of thumb with accurate measurements. "

" Desktop computers - boxes inside boxes - began appearing in those cubicles in the mid-eighties, electrical cords curling on the floor like so many ropes. "