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 LeporeRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Love for children can exist even amid high mortality rates.
This quote challenges a historical preconception regarding parental love and childhood mortality. It emphasizes that despite the pain associated with the loss of children in high-mortality societies, the depth of love parents have for their children can be profound and unchanging—a love that persists in adversity and loss, rather than being diminished by it.
Themes
LoveChildrenMortalityParentingHistory
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about parenting, one might reference this quote to illustrate the depth of parental love throughout history.
More from Jill Lepore
All quotes →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 LeporeRead
History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what to do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from.
Jill LeporeRead
Similar quotes
In every age, people are certain that only the things they have deemed valuable have true value. The search for love and the search for wealth are always the two best stories. But while a love story is timeless, the story of a quest for wealth, given enough time, will always seem like the vain pursuit of a mirage.
Mark KurlanskyRead
Angels and ministers of grace defend us.
William ShakespeareRead
The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own traveling brotherhood.
Freya StarkRead
It is racist, and it was racist when it was created. The Indian Act controls, or seeks to control, the lives of all indigenous people in a way that you and I would never accept.
Paul MartinRead
The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life to a function that doesn't interest you. This situation so repelled me that I was driven to drink, starvation, and mad females, simply as an alternative.
Charles BukowskiRead
Unless some effective world supergovernment for the purpose of preventing war can be set up ... the prospects for peace and human progress are dark ....If .... it is found possible to build a world organization of irresistible force and inviolable authority for the purpose of securing peace, there are no limits to the blessings which all men enjoy and share.
Winston ChurchillRead