David McCullough Quotes

The truth isn't just the facts. You can have all the facts imaginable and miss the truth, just as you can have facts missing or some wrong, and reach the larger truth.

There is only one person who can measure your success. That person is you.

I think that we need history as much as we need bread or water or love.

First of all, you can make the argument that there's no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past.

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?

You have to have wisdom and knowledge as well as virtue to preserve your rights and liberties.

The most interesting people are never perfect.

He had kept his head, kept his health and his strength, bearing up under a weight of work and worry that only a few could have carried.

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.

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.

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)

You can't love what you don't know much about. You can't convince, stimulate, hold the attention, teach, if you don't know what you're talking about.

It was an utterly phenomenal achievement.

Nobody ever lived in the past.

Home is really where education does begin.

I would pay to do what I do if I had to.

However little television you watch, watch less.

I love all sides of the work but that doesn't mean it isn't hard.

Only those who [do] nothing [make] no mistakes.

You have overburdened your argument with ostentatious erudition.

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.

My love is to tell a story but I like stories that evolve from character, from the nature of the individuals involved.

...Had proven himself a leader of remarkable ability, a man not only of enterprising ideas, but with the staying power to carry them out.

I feel that as much as I enjoy loafing, there is something higher for which to live.

There's no such thing as a foreseeable future.

It would be the most crucial day of the entire war.

There are no people on earth in whom a spirit of enthusiastic zeal is so readily kindled, and burns so remarkably, as Americans

Napoleon could never imagine that some people loved their country as much as he loved his own.

Washington had performed his role to perfection. It was no enough that a leader look the part; by Washington's rules, he must know how to act it with self-command and precision.

The title always comes last. What I really work hard on is the beginning. Where do you begin? In what tone do you begin? I almost have to have a scene in my mind.

I lament the want of a liberal education. I feel the mist of ignorance to surround me - Nathanael Greene

I love Dickens. I love the way he sets a scene.

The more we see the founders as humans the more we can understand them.

Just imagine if in his inaugural address John F. Kennedy had said, 'Ask not what your country can, you know, do for you, but what you can, like, do for your country actually.

I often think of that when I hear people say that they haven't time to read.

Nothing ever invented can you a bigger life than a book.

To write is to think, and to write well is to think well.

Freedom is found through the portals of our nation's libraries.

America faces an enemy who believes in enforced ignorance. And all that we stand for is the open mind, the generous spirit, the ideal of tolerance, freedom, education, opportunity.

Read somewhat in the English poets every day. You will find them elegant, entertaining and constructive companions through your whole life.

Remove yourself, sir!

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)

A man who will steal for me will steal from me." Theodore Roosevelt, dismissing on the spot one of his best cowhands who was about to claim for his boss an unmarked animal.

The reason is, because it’s of more importance to community, that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt should be punished.

Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard.", July/Aug. 2002, Vol. 23/No. 4)

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.", NEH Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities 2003)

Indeed, bribery, favoritism, and corruption in a great variety of forms were rampant not only in politics, but in all levels of society.

To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or musi

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to

marinate your mind