Top 100 David McCullough Quotes
#2. Three things ruin a man," Harry would tell a reporter long afterward. "Power, money, and women. "I never wanted power," he said. "I never had any money, and the only woman in my life is up at the house right now." On
David McCullough
#3. Read. Read every chance you get. Read to keep growing. Read history. Read poetry. Read for pure enjoyment. Read a book called Life on a Little Known Planet. It's about insects. It will make you feel better.
David McCullough
#4. When I'm reading for my own pleasure, I read things other than history or archival material. I read a lot of fiction. I'm very fond of mysteries.
David McCullough
#5. But it isn't true," Orville responded emphatically, "to say we had no special advantages . . . the greatest thing in our favor was growing up in a family where there was always much encouragement to intellectual curiosity.
David McCullough
#6. Every book is a new journey. I never felt I was an expert on a subject as I embarked on a project.
David McCullough
#7. Real success is finding your lifework in the work that you love.
David McCullough
#8. With the Truman book, I wrote the entire account of his experiences in World War I before going over to Europe to follow his tracks in the war. When I got there, there was a certain satisfaction in finding I had it right - it does look like that.
David McCullough
#9. History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.
David McCullough
#10. Why limit yourself to the experience of your own relatively brief time on earth, according to your biological clock, when the whole realm of the human experience reaching back infinitely far is available to you?
David McCullough
#13. Thanks to God that he gave me stubbornness when I know I am right. ~John
David McCullough
#14. Let us have gardens, then, and other public places where we may see our friends, and parade our vanities, if you will, before the eyes of the world. Did you ever know anyone who was not delighted with a garden? - John Sanderson
David McCullough
#15. Yes, this is a dangerous time. Yes, this is a time full of shadows and fear. But we have been through worse before and we have faced more difficult days before. We have shown courage and determination, and skillful and inventive and courageous and committed responses to crisis before.
David McCullough
#17. The preservation of liberty depends upon the intellectual and moral character of the people. As long as knowledge and virtue are diffused generally among the body of a nation, it is impossible they should be enslaved. . . .
David McCullough
#19. Honesty, sincerity, and openness, I esteem essential marks of a good mind,
David McCullough
#20. If you get down about the state of American culture, just remember there are still more public libraries in this country than there are McDonalds.
David McCullough
#21. In time I began to understand that it's when you start writing that you really find out what you don't know and need to know.
David McCullough
#22. The sunsets, he told her, were the most beautiful he had ever seen, the clouds lighting up in all colors, the stars at night so bright he could read his watch by them.
David McCullough
#23. Dyer 5 bu Paid 3.50 Hogs and Cattle Aug 23 9 hogs to K.C. 74.38 24 1 " " " 15.93 Oct 18 1 cow " " 32.85
David McCullough
#25. The past after all is only another name for someone else's present.
David McCullough
#27. I feel that what I do is a calling. I would pay to do what I do if I had to. I will never live long enough to do the work I want to do: the books I would like to write, the ideas I would like to explore.
David McCullough
#28. Why do some men reach for the stars and so many others never even look up?
David McCullough
#29. The pull, the attraction of history, is in our human nature. What makes us tick? Why do we do what we do? How much is luck the deciding factor?
David McCullough
#30. Every line from you exhilarates my spirits and gives me a glow of pleasure, but your kind congratulations are solid comfort to my heart. The little strength of mind and the considerable strenght of body that I once possessed appear to be all gone, but while I breathe I shall be your friend.
David McCullough
#31. A lie," he was once heard to declare on the floor of the Senate, "is an abomination unto the Lord and an ever-present help in time of need.
David McCullough
#32. He asked for national compulsory health insurance to be funded by payroll deductions. Under the system, all citizens would receive medical and hospital service irrespective of their ability to pay. And
David McCullough
#33. In fact, it was the largest expeditionary force of the 18th century. The largest, most powerful force ever set forth from Britain or any nation.
David McCullough
#34. his recreational passion at Sagamore Hill that summer of 1903 was the so-called point-to-point "obstacle walk," the one rule, the only rule, being that the participant must go up and over, or through, every obstacle, never around it.
David McCullough
#35. He held to the old guidelines: work hard, do your best, speak the truth, assume no airs, trust in God, have no fear.
David McCullough
#37. Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard.
(Interview with NEH chairman Bruce Cole, Humanities, July/Aug. 2002, Vol. 23/No. 4)
David McCullough
#38. I could not do what I do without the kindness, consideration, resourcefulness and work of librarians, particularly in public libraries. What started me writing history happened because of some curiosity that I had about some photographs I'd seen in the Library of Congress.
David McCullough
#39. About these scientists," Truman said, "we need men with great intellects, need their ideas. But we need to balance them with other kinds of people, too.
David McCullough
#40. I am adamant that we must not cut back on funding of the teaching of the arts in the schools: music, painting, theater, dance, all of it. The great thing about the arts is that the only way you learn how to do it is by doing it.
David McCullough
#41. You've got to marinate your head, in that time and culture.
You've got to become them.
(Speaking about researching, and reading, and immersing yourself in History)
David McCullough
#42. power is not the point, responsibility is the point and at the heart of responsibility always are moral choices. In what we do, in what we say, what we stand for, we must feel, as did the founders of the nation, as did the founders of this college, that it is the example of America that matters. So
David McCullough
#43. You will ever remember that all the end of study is to make you a good man and a useful citizen, Adams
David McCullough
#44. s ships Phoenix and Rose, in the company of three tenders, cast off their moorings at Staten Island and started up the harbor under full sail, moving swiftly with the favorable wind and a perfect flood tide. Alarm guns sounded in New York. Soldiers
David McCullough
#45. When you see one of these graceful crafts sailing over your head, and possibly over your home, as I expect you will in the near future, see if you don't agree with me that the flying machine is one of God's most gracious and precious gifts.
David McCullough
#46. Yes, we have much to be seriously concerned about, much that needs to be corrected, improved, or dispensed with. But the vitality and creative energy, the fundamental decency, the tolerance and insistence on truth, and the good-heartedness of the American people are there still plainly. Many
David McCullough
#47. There are people who are trying to write history for the general reader who can be quite tedious. That said, I do feel in my heart of hearts that if history isn't well written, it isn't going to be read, and if it isn't read it's going to die.
David McCullough
#48. I lament the want of a liberal education. I feel the mist of ignorance to surround me - Nathanael Greene
David McCullough
#49. If the attitude of the teacher toward the material is positive, enthusiastic, committed and excited, the students get that. If the teacher is bored, students get that and they get bored, quickly, instinctively.
David McCullough
#50. A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia.
David McCullough
#52. Common sense was sufficient to determine that it could not mean that all men were equal in fact, but in right, not all equally tall, strong, wise, handsome, active, but equally men . . . the work of the same Artist, children in the same cases entitled to the same justice. Nabby
David McCullough
#53. Is vintage Bunau-Varilla: My only reply to such critics is that they have not the
David McCullough
#54. Later that same spring of 1872, in his own annual report, Roebling would write that most men got over their troubles either by suffering for a long time or "by applying the heroic mode of returning into the caisson at once as soon as pains manifested themselves.
David McCullough
#55. People were born and raised Democrats as they were born and raised Baptists or Catholics. It was not something you questioned. As one said, "You were a Democrat come hell or high water. Or you were a Republican." In
David McCullough
#56. By the time he went to work for James J. Hill in 1889, he had survived Mexican fevers, Indian attack, Upper Michigan mosquitoes, and Canadian blizzards. He had been treed by wolves on one occasion; he
David McCullough
#57. I'm very aware how many distractions the reader has in life today, how many good reasons there are to put the book down.
David McCullough
#58. Each generation, we peel back biases that have blinded those before us. The more we know about the past enables us to ask richer and more provocative questions about who we are today.
David McCullough
#59. It is very bad policy to ask one flying machine man about the experiments of another, because every flying machine man thinks that his method is the only correct one.
David McCullough
#60. And it's so easy because you become so self-conscious and so intellectual and so analytical about it in the long run that you lose that wonderful sort of ego that you have that says, 'Oh, goddamn it, I don't care; I love it anyway; I'm going to do it!
David McCullough
#61. There is no doubt that people are in the long run what the government make out of them . . . ," Adams read in Rousseau. "The government ought to be what the people make it," he wrote in response. At
David McCullough
#63. If we think back through our own lives, the subjects that you liked best in school almost certainly were taught by the teachers you liked best. And the teacher you liked best was the teacher who cared about the subject she taught.
David McCullough
#64. Lord Chatham, the King of Prussia, nay, Alexander the Great, never gained more in one campaign than the noble lord has lost-he has lost a whole continent.
David McCullough
#65. Make business first, pleasure afterward, and that guarded. All the money anyone needs is just enough to prevent one from being a burden on others. He made a point of treating
David McCullough
#66. The more we see the founders as humans the more we can understand them.
David McCullough
#68. My shorthand answer is that I try to write the kind of book that I would like to read. If I can make it clear and interesting and compelling to me, then I hope maybe it will be for the reader.
David McCullough
#69. I want people to see that all-important time in a different way-in the way it was. For of a number of reasons, including the absence of photographs, we tend to see the men and women of the Revolution as not quite real. And we have far too little sense of what they suffered.
David McCullough
#70. it seems to me that one of the truths about history that needs to be made clear to a student or to a reader is that nothing ever had to happen the way it happened.
David McCullough
#71. Farmers and soldiers knew about the weather. Weather could be the great determiner between failure and success, the great test of one's staying power.
David McCullough
#72. Your father's zeal for books will be one of the last desires which will quit him, Abigail observed to John Quincy
David McCullough
#73. Only TR openly declared his love for the job. "Nobody ever enjoyed the presidency as I did," he boasted, and by all evidence that was so. "While president I have been president emphatically," he said. It
David McCullough
#74. A man who works for the immediate present and its immediate rewards is nothing but a fool.
David McCullough
#75. The best dividends on the labor invested have invariably come from seeking more knowledge rather than more power. Signed Wilbur and Orville Wright, March 12, 1906.
David McCullough
#76. It must not remain our desire only to acquire the art of the bird," Lilienthal had written. "It is our duty not to rest until we have attained a perfect scientific conception of the problem of flight.
David McCullough
#79. Wright died in his room at home at 7 Hawthorn Street at 3:15 in the morning, Thursday, May 30, 1912. He was forty-five years old.
David McCullough
#80. When I read that the British army had landed thirty-two thousand troops - and I had realized, not very long before, that Philadelphia only had thirty thousand people in it - it practically lifted me out of my chair.
David McCullough
#81. To hold the reader's attention, you have to bring the person who's reading the book inside the experience of the time: What was it like to have been alive then? What were these people like as human beings?
David McCullough
#82. I'm absolutely positive it's in our human nature to want to know about the past. The two most popular movies of all time, while not historically accurate, are about core historic events: Gone With the Wind and Titanic.
David McCullough
#83. Once rolling the train would travel under the code name "POTUS," for "President of the United States,
David McCullough
#84. Public business, my son, must always be done by somebody. It will be done by somebody or other. If wise men decline it, others will not; if honest men refuse it, others will not.
David McCullough
#85. On a medical school professor noted for slowly, carefully interviewing the patient: He taught the love of truth.
David McCullough
#86. Remembered "the wind usually blows." Nowhere in the talk had he said a word about the gasoline
David McCullough
#87. I feel that history is in many ways the most important of all subjects because it is about everything and because it's about who we are and how we came to be the way we are.
David McCullough
#88. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could - from a poem by Daniel Defoe, as written by Abigail to John Adams
David McCullough
#89. To shut yourself from history is to shut yourself off from say music or painting or the theatre, literature for the rest of your life. It would be to cheat yourself of the pleasures of life.
David McCullough
#90. Every mind should be true to itself - should think, investigate and conclude for itself, wrote Ingersoll.
David McCullough
#91. A veteran artist counsels a less experienced one to start a painting using colors in the middle range so that the painter can move to more extreme colors as the work progresses.
David McCullough
#92. To this noble end the delegates had pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.
David McCullough
#93. You won't get fired if you do something, you will if you don't do anything. Do something if it is wrong, for you can correct that, but there is no way to correct nothing.
David McCullough
#94. We dared to hope we had invented something that would bring lasting peace to the earth. But we were wrong. . .
David McCullough
#95. Of all animal movements, flight is indisputably the finest. . . . The fact that a creature as heavy, bulk for bulk, as many solid substances, can by the unaided movements of its wings urge itself through the air with a speed little short of a cannonball, fills the mind with wonder.
David McCullough
#96. We should draw on our story, we should draw on our history. If we don't know who we are, if we don't know how we became what we are, we're going to start suffering from all the obvious detrimental effects of amnesia.
David McCullough
#97. When a bill was put before the state legislature in Jefferson City that would have prohibited anyone who owned a saloon from holding elective office and reporters asked what he thought of it, Alderman Jim said probably the bill was intended as a way of improving the reputation of saloonkeepers.
David McCullough
#100. Adams lay peacefully, his mind clear, by all signs. Then late in the afternoon, according to several who were present in the room, he stirred and whispered clearly enough to be understood, Thomas Jefferson survives.
David McCullough
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