Top 280 David McCullough Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “I work very hard on the writing, writing and rewriting and trying to weed out the lumber.”

— David McCullough

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

— David McCullough

103. “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.”

— David McCullough

104. “I’m drawn particularly to stories that evolve out of the character of the protagonist.”

— David McCullough

105. “To this noble end the delegates had pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.”

— David McCullough

106. “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

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

— David McCullough

108. “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.”

— David McCullough

109. “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

110. “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

111. “One of the things about the arts that is so important is that in the arts you discover the only way to learn how to do it is by doing it. You can’t write by reading a book about it. The only way to learn how to write a book is to sit down and try to write a book.”

— David McCullough

112. “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

113. “I would pay to do what I do if I had to.”

— David McCullough

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

— David McCullough

115. “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.”

— David McCullough

116. “I had been writing for about twelve years. I knew pretty well how you could find things out, but I had never been trained in an academic way how to go about the research.”

— David McCullough

117. “We must not think of learning as only what happens in schools. It is an extended part of life. The most readily available resource for all of life is our public library system.”

— David McCullough

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

— David McCullough

119. “It would be the most crucial day of the entire war.”

— David McCullough

120. “Higher, Orville, higher!”

— David McCullough

121. “All American citizens, whether born here or elsewhere, whether of one creed or another, stand on the same footing; we welcome every honest immigrant no matter from what country he comes, provided only that he leaves off his former nationality, and remains neither Celt nor Saxon, neither Frenchman nor German, but becomes an American, desirous of fulfilling in good faith the duties of American citizenship.”

— David McCullough

122. “Washington, who regretted all his life that he never had the advantage of a formal education, wrote, “Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.”

— David McCullough

123. “The smell of the midnight lamp is very unwholesome. Never defraud yourself of sleep, nor your walk. You need not now be in a hurry.”

— David McCullough

124. “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

125. “Nothing happens in isolation. Everything that happens has consequences. We.”

— David McCullough

126. “The preparations were elaborate and mammoth in scale, and Washington threw himself into the effort, demanding that not an hour be lost.”

— David McCullough

127. “A man who works for the immediate present and its immediate rewards is nothing but a fool.”

— David McCullough

128. “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

129. “If ignorance could be banished from our land, a real millennium would commence. – EPHRAIM CUTLER.”

— David McCullough

130. “But it is not really necessary to look too far into the future; we see enough already to be certain that it will be magnificent. Only let us hurry and open the roads.”

— David McCullough

131. “Sadly, too many today take for granted public schools, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, equality before the law, forgetting that these were ever novel and daring ideas. Once.”

— David McCullough

132. “I love Dickens. I love the way he sets a scene.”

— David McCullough

133. “To the British and those Loyalists who had taken refuge in Boston, they were simply “the rebels,” or “the country people,” undeserving the words “American” or “army.” General John Burgoyne disdainfully dubbed them “a preposterous parade,” a “rabble in arms.”

— David McCullough

134. “For a free, self-governing people, something more than a vague familiarity with history is essential, if we are to hold on to and sustain our freedom.”

— David McCullough

135. “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

136. “Outer Banks people were still pretty “set in their ways,” Tate added. “We believed in a good God, a bad Devil, and a hot Hell, and more than anything else we believed that same God did not intend man should ever fly.”

— David McCullough

137. “When the world is storm-driven and the bad that happens and the worse that threatens are so urgent as to shut out everything else from view, then we need to know all the strong fortresses of the spirit which men have built through the ages.”

— David McCullough

138. “Margaret Chase Smith “I speak as a Republican,” she said on that memorable day in the Senate. “I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States Senator. I speak as an American. I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny – fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear.”

— David McCullough

139. “Free speech is a restraint on government; not an incitement to the citizen.”

— David McCullough

140. “Count the day lost at which the setting sun sees at its close no worthy action done.”

— David McCullough

141. “In fact, the Americans of 1776 enjoyed a higher standard of living than any people in the world. Their material wealth was considerably less than it would become in time, still it was a great deal more than others had elsewhere. How people with so much, living on their own land, would ever choose to rebel against the ruler God had put over them and thereby bring down such devastation upon themselves was for the invaders incomprehensible.”

— David McCullough

142. “He was also a vociferous champion of abstinence from hard or spirituous liquors – but then no one’s perfect. In.”

— David McCullough

143. “On the matter of advancing age, he liked to say, “My sun is far past its meridian.”

— David McCullough

144. “Read history. By all means read history. We are all where we are, each of us, because others helped.”

— David McCullough

145. “Seeing things as they were, and not as he would wish them to be, was one of his salient strengths.”

— David McCullough

146. “You have to know what people have been through to understand what people want and what they don’t want. That’s the nub of it. And what people have been through is what we call history.”

— David McCullough

147. “The people – why the people are magnificent: in their carriages, which are numerous, in their house furniture, which is fine, in their pride and conceit, which are inimitable, in their profaneness, which is intolerable, in the want of principle, which is prevalent, in their Toryism, which is insufferable.”

— David McCullough

148. “LORD BOLINGBROKE, the eighteenth-century political philosopher, said that “history is philosophy teaching by examples.” Thucydides is reported to have said much the same thing two thousand years earlier. Jefferson.”

— David McCullough

149. “We learn much by tribulation, and by adversity our hearts are made better. -Bishop Milton Wright to Orville Wright, 20 Sept. 1908.”

— David McCullough

150. “Rather than literally burning the midnight oil, which he judged to be unhealthy, John Adams advised his son to make the most of college by developing an inquisitive outlook that would prompt him to get to know the most exceptional scholars and question them closely. “Ask them about their tutors, manner of teaching. Observe what books lie on their tables. Fall into questions of literature, science, or what you will.”

— David McCullough