Top 280 David McCullough Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “I often think of that when I hear people say that they haven’t time to read.”

— David McCullough

102. “I think that a good education ought to be in part the idea that ease and joy are not synonymous. Some of the most fulfilling pleasures of life are to be found in work – found in work you love to do, work you want to do, work that makes you want to get out of bed in the morning.”

— David McCullough

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

— David McCullough

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

— David McCullough

105. “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

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. “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

108. “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

109. “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

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

— David McCullough

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

— David McCullough

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

— David McCullough

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

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

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

— David McCullough

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

— David McCullough

120. “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

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

— David McCullough

122. “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

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. “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

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

— David McCullough

126. “Higher, Orville, higher!”

— David McCullough

127. “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

128. “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

129. “The disaster at Johnstown was one that need never have happened and a powerful reminder that it can be terribly dangerous, even perilous, to assume that because people hold positions of responsibility they are therefore acting responsibly.”

— David McCullough

130. “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

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

— David McCullough

132. “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

133. “You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket. You will never have an idle hour.”

— David McCullough

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

— David McCullough

135. “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

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

— David McCullough

137. “The world needs you. There is large work to be done, good work, and you can make a difference. Whatever your life work, take it seriously and enjoy it. Let’s never be the kind of people who do things lukewarmly. If you’re going to ring the bell, give the rope one hell of a pull. I wish you the fullest lives possible – full of love and bells ringing.”

— David McCullough

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

— David McCullough

139. “All of Johnstown’s three or four blind people had survived the flood.”

— David McCullough

140. “Not all pioneers went west.”

— David McCullough

141. “Asked how it was that he could do so much and accomplish so much, he said, “I’ve learned to use every one of all the odds and ends of the time.”

— David McCullough

142. “Two all-important lessons of history stand clearly expressed in this our national Capitol. The first is that little of consequence is ever accomplished alone. High achievement is nearly always a joint effort, as has been shown again and again in these halls when the leaders of different parties, representatives from differing constituencies and differing points of view, have been able, for the good of the country, to put those differences aside and work together.”

— David McCullough

143. “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

144. “When our founders spoke of the “pursuit of happiness,” they did not mean long vacations or the piling up of things. Happiness was in the enlargement of one’s being through the life of the mind and of the spirit.”

— David McCullough

145. “But let us not forget, too, that it was John Adams who nominated George Washington to be commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. It was John Adams who insisted that Jefferson be the one to write the Declaration of Independence. And it was President John Adams who made John Marshall chief justice of the Supreme Court. As a casting director alone, he was brilliant. Abigail.”

— David McCullough

146. “Strange it was that the British commander-in-chief, known for his chronic gambling, seemed to give no thought to how his American opponent might play his hand. O.”

— David McCullough

147. “Had Howe pressed on the afternoon of the 27th, the British victory could have been total. Or had the wind turned earlier, and the British navy moved into the East River, the war and the chances of an independent United States of America could have been long delayed, or even ended there and then.”

— David McCullough

148. “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

149. “Lord Bolingbroke, who was an eighteenth-century political philosopher, called history “philosophy taught with examples.”

— David McCullough

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

— David McCullough