Jill Lepore Quotes

Wishful thinking is not sound public policy.

Good policy analysis recognizes that physical truth may be poorly or incompletely known. Its objective is to evaluate, order, and structure incomplete knowledge so as to allow decisions to be made with as complete an understanding as possible of the current state of knowledge, its limitations, and its implications.

Voters are not great at reading issues. They are great at reading character.

There's a lot of new subject matter to learn. You start slowly peeling the onion and start figuring out how the policy and the politics intersect.

When intelligent people read, they ask themselves a simple question: What do I plan to do with this information?

My mantra about everything that has to do with public policy is: identify and reject the false choice.

When I get the point, I often don't know what to do with it.

The first week in intelligence school, you learn there are only two conditions in life. There is policy success, or there is intel failure. There is no other condition in life.

I think that it's a mistake to assume that because you're taking a position from somebody else who you might disagree with - or you know you disagree with on some things - to assume that you disagree with on everything and to not look at each policy on its own merits.

My experience in government is there is a whole host of unintended consequences you have to think through. I can't un-know that, I find it harder now to offer simple solutions.

There is an old maxim which states that good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from poor judgment. I think something similar can be said of government policy, to wit: Good policy comes from experience, and experience comes from poor policy.

I don't think I would move into politics, but our job is often about pulling things down. It's about why something won't work, which I think is valuable, but it's not always constructive.

It is my job to know the difference between information and intelligence.

Believe me, you don't want to be at a company where there is more candor in the hallways than in the rooms where fundamental ideas or policy are being hashed out.

I like debating policy.

Because I've always been good at knowing what I thought and not reviewing prematurely and have gotten better at those things over the years, my flips are rarely that significant.

In a mature democracy any proposed policy should be subjected to a close analysis of its likely benefits and costs.

There's always that tension between policy and personality in politics, and as voters, we have that, too: we all vote on issues, but we also vote on whether we like the people who are put forward.

The more we educate folks, the more it will help them make informed policy decisions.

When information overload occurs, pattern recognition is how to determine truth.

Migration has been politicized before it has been analyzed.

Of course, having information to use is one thing. Knowing what it means and how to use it is a different story.

Policy is driven by more than politics, however. It is equally driven by ideas.

In modern times sound policy-making must often come to grips with numbers.

The world would be a better place if people stopped voting for folksy candidates they could have a beer with and started voting for people smarter than they are.