Top 159 Quotes & Sayings by David McCullough - Page 2

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.

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

I think it's important to remember that these men are not perfect. If they were marble gods, what they did wouldn't be so admirable. The more we see the founders as humans the more we can understand them.

Curiosity is what separates us from the cabbages. It's accelerative. The more we know, the more we want to know.

The year 1776, celebrated as the birth year of the nation and for the signing of the Declaration of Independence, was for those who carried the fight for independence forward a year of all-too-few victories, of sustained suffering, disease, hunger, desertion, cowardice, disillusionment, defeat, terrible discouragement, and fear, as they would never forget, but also of phenomenal courage and bedrock devotion to country, and that, too they would never forget.

People often ask me if I'm working on a book. That's not how I feel. I feel like I work in a book. It's like putting myself under a spell. And this spell, if you will, is so real to me that if I have to leave my work for a few days, I have to work myself back into the spell when I come back. It's almost like hypnosis.

Exercise free will and creative, independent thought not for the satisfactions they will bring you, but for the good they will do others, the rest of the 6.8 billion–and those who will follow them. And then you too will discover the great and curious truth of the human experience is that selflessness is the best thing you can do for yourself. The sweetest joys of life, then, come only with the recognition that you’re not special. Because everyone is.

I love to go to the places where things happen. I like to walk the walk and see how the light falls and what winter feels like.

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

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.

The evil of technology was not technology itself, Lindbergh came to see after the war, not in airplanes or the myriad contrivances of modern technical igenuity, but in the extent to which they can distance us from our better moral nature, or sense of personal accountability.

Nobody ever lived in the past.

Let the children have their night of fun and laughter. Let the gifts of Father Christmas delight their play. Let us grown-ups share to the full in their unstinted pleasures before we turn again to the stern task and the formidable years that lie before us, resolved that, by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world." Winston Churchill Christmas Eve Message, 1941 as printed in "In the Dark Streets Shineth.

However little television you watch, watch less.

History is about life. It's awful when the life is squeezed out of it and there's no flavor left, no uncertainties, no horsing around. It always disturbed me how many biographers never gave their subjects a chance to eat. You can tell a lot about people by how they eat, what they eat, and what kind of table manners they have.

Take the teacher not the course. Find out who the great professors are - the great teachers - and take their courses because a subject that you may not think you're interested in may turn out to be infinitely fascinating because of the way it's taught.

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.

On Christmas morning when I was a child, my mother would leave a book wrapped at the foot of the bed, which was a hint that Santa had come. It was also her way of keeping us in bed a little longer before we went downstairs. So I've always associated books with happiness and gifts. And they are. I can't get enough of them.

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?

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.

It was an utterly phenomenal achievement.

The first of all qualities of a general is courage.

The great thing about the arts is that you can only learn to do it by doing it.

Any nation that expects to be ignorant and free," Jefferson said, "expects what never was and never will be." And if the gap between the educated and the uneducated in America continues to grow as it is in our time, as fast as or faster than the gap between the rich and the poor, the gap between the educated and the uneducated is going to be of greater consequence and the more serious threat to our way of life. We must not, by any means, misunderstand that.

It was a day and age that saw no reason why one could not learn whatever was required - learn vitally anything - by the close study of books.

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.

I feel very strongly that history is about everything. It isn't just about politics or the military or social issues. If art, music, engineering, science, medicine, finance, the world of architecture and technology - if those are left out, then you're not getting a full sense of the human condition. History is human and we human beings are involved in all kinds of things and that's part of our humanity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The source of our suffering has been our timidity. We have been afraid to think....Let us dare to read, think, speak, write.

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.

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.

We still dislike hypocrites. It's a very American characteristic. We still like people who have ideas and who are willing to stand up for what they believe in. We're very forgiving of failures and very willing to give people a second and third chance if they mean to do better and are sorry for what they've done.

Morality only is eternal. All the rest is balloon and bubble from the cradle to the grave.

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.'

The most interesting people are never perfect.

Find something to do that you love because then the work itself is always the reward not the recompense. And if you love what you're doing you probably do better at it than doing something you don't love and therefore you'll be compensated appropriately.

Your education never stops and college is just the beginning. You come out of college with a huge advantage in that you've ideally and more times than not you've come out with a love of learning and that's what matters above all.

When a friend of Abigail and John Adams was killed at Bunker Hill, Abigail's response was to write a letter to her husband and include these words, "My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.

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.

I think it is one of the most extraordinary elections, a turning point for our country and for the world. That remarkable young man [Barack Obama] has kept his demeanor, kept his temperament and has shown a power to inspire. I see what energy that he has inspired among the young. Well, it inspires us old goats too.

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.

Unlike the people you see in Mathew Brady's photographs from the Civil War, the men and women of the Revolution seem more like characters in a costume pageant. And it's a pageant in which the performers are all handsome as stage actors, with uniforms and dress that are always costume perfect.

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.

There are innumerable writing problems in an extended work. One book took a little more than six years. You, the writer, change in six years. The life around you changes. Your family changes. They grow up. They move away. The world is changing. You're also learning more about the subject. By the time you're writing the last chapters of the book, you know much more than you did when you started at the beginning.

I write on the typewriter. I like it because I like the feeling of making something with my hands. I like pressing the key and a letter comes up and is printed on a piece of paper. I can understand that.

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)

Home is really where education does begin.

I think it's best to pick a biographical subject who lives to a ripe old age. Older people tend to relax and speak their minds. They're dropping some of the masks that they've been wearing. There's a candor.

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.

I don't pick my presidents because they were great presidents. I'm not much interested in ranking presidents and who is the best and who is the worst. I am much more inclined to be interested in them if they had an interesting life and if they were a complete person - and by that I mean they also had flaws and failings.

Read. Read. Read. Read. Read great books. Read poetry, history, biography. Read the novels that have stood the test of time. And read closely.

When you start to write, things begin to come into focus in a way they don't when you're not writing. It's a very good way to find out how much you don't know because you learn specifically what you need to know that you don't know at the moment by writing.

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.

Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard.

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.