Top 280 David McCullough Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “I’m drawn particularly to stories that evolve out of the character of the protagonist.”

— David McCullough

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

— David McCullough

103. “I often think of that when I hear people say that they haven’t time to read.”

— David McCullough

104. “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

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

— David McCullough

106. “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

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. “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

110. “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

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

— David McCullough

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

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

— David McCullough

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

— David McCullough

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

— David McCullough

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

— David McCullough

120. “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

121. “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

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. “Higher, Orville, higher!”

— David McCullough

126. “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

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

— David McCullough

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

— David McCullough

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

— 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. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

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

— David McCullough

139. “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

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

— David McCullough

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

— David McCullough

142. “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

143. “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

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

— David McCullough

145. “Gentlemen, enlisted men may be entitled to morale problems, but officers are not. I expect all officers to take care of their own morale. No one is taking care of my morale. – General George C. Marshall.”

— David McCullough

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

— David McCullough

147. “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

148. “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

149. “How unpardonable would it have been in you to have turned out a blockhead. How.”

— David McCullough

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

— David McCullough