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History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence.

— Jill Lepore Story of America: essays on origins (2014)

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More quotes by Jill Lepore

Before Barbie, dolls were babies, to be fed and burped and bathed and wheeled around in prams and put down for naps.

Who needs consciousness-raising and equal pay, when you’re an Amazon with an invisible plane?

I never set out to study history. I only ever set out to write.

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.

As Kozinski would write in his opinion in Mattel v. MGA, it’s possible to make dolls that don’t look like porn stars but “there’s not a big market for fashion dolls that look like Patty and Selma Bouvier”—a reference to Lisa Simpson’s big-nosed, wide-waisted, thick-ankled aunts.

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A generation which ignores history has no past —and no future.

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love (1973)

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

James Joyce Ulysses (1922)

If we don’t care about our past we can’t have very much hope for our future.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past, — so good night!

Thomas Jefferson

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Jill Lepore (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.