Top 280 David McCullough Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Read history. By all means read history. We are all where we are, each of us, because others helped.”

— David McCullough

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

— David McCullough

153. “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

154. “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

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

— David McCullough

156. “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

157. “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

158. “For some people the experience of crossing by carriage was positively terrifying. “You drive over to Suspension Bridge,” wrote Mark Twain, “and divide your misery between the chances of smashing down two hundred feet into the river below, and the chances of having a railway-train overhead smashing down onto you. Either possibility is discomforting taken by itself, but, mixed together, they amount in the aggregate to positive unhappiness.”

— David McCullough

159. “For more than fifty years, or long before the Wright brothers took up their part, would-be “conquerors of the air” and their strange or childish flying machines, as described in the press, had served as a continuous source of popular comic relief.”

— David McCullough

160. “Even mighty states and kingdoms are not exempted. If we look into history, we shall find some nations rising from contemptible beginnings and spreading their influence, until the whole globe is subjected to their ways. When they have reached the summit of grandeur, some minute and unsuspected cause commonly affects their ruin, and the empire of the world is transferred to some other place. Immortal.”

— David McCullough

161. “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

— David McCullough

162. “Not all pioneers went west.”

— David McCullough

163. “THE CAMPAIGN OF 1776 had ended with a second astonishing victory. Had Washington been born in the days of idolatry, declared the Pennsylvania Journal, he would be worshiped as a god. “If there are spots on his character, they are like the spots on the sun, only discernible by the magnifying powers of a telescope.”

— David McCullough

164. “Included among the ecclesiastical works on his bedroom shelves were the writings of “The Great Agnostic,” Robert Ingersoll, whom the brothers and Katharine were encouraged to read. “Every mind should be true to itself – should think, investigate and conclude for itself,” wrote Ingersoll. It was the influence of Ingersoll apparently that led the brothers to give up regular attendance at church, a change the Bishop seems to have accepted without protest.”

— David McCullough

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

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

— David McCullough

172. “Recalling a line attributed to Wilbur – “Well, if I talked a lot I should be like a parrot, which is the bird that speaks most and flies least.” – Buist.”

— David McCullough

173. “What had transpired that day in 1903, in the stiff winds and cold of the Outer Banks in less than two hours time, was one of the turning points in history, the beginning of change for the world far greater than any of those present could possibly have imagined.”

— David McCullough

174. “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study paintings, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”

— David McCullough

175. “Everybody wants something at the expense of everybody else and nobody thinks much of the other fellow,” Truman.”

— David McCullough

176. “In fact, the Americans of 1776 enjoyed a higher standard of living than any people in the world.”

— David McCullough

177. “O kings and presidents, Adams said he saw little to distinguish them from other men. ‘If worthless men are sometimes at the head of affairs, it is, I believe, because worthless men are at the tail and the middle.”

— David McCullough

178. “Washington insisted – possibly to rally his own resolve – that they must never lose sight of “the goodness of our cause.” Difficulties were not insurmountable. “Perseverance and spirit have done wonders in all ages.”

— David McCullough

179. “Adams was both a devout Christian and an independent thinker, and he saw no conflict in that.”

— David McCullough

180. “No bird soars in a calm. WILBUR WRIGHT.”

— David McCullough

181. “In a day and age when, unfortunately, so few write letters or keep a diary any longer, the Wright Papers stand as a striking reminder of a time when that was not the way and of the immense value such writings can have in bringing history to life.”

— David McCullough

182. “The best dividends on the labor invested,” they said, “have invariably come from seeking more knowledge rather than more power.”

— David McCullough

183. “The only way to compose myself and collect my thoughts,” he wrote in his diary,“is to set down at my table, place my diary before me, and take my pen into my hand.”

— David McCullough

184. “I think instead of opposing systematically any administration, running down their characters and opposing all their measures, right or wrong, we ought to support every administration as far as we can in justice.”

— David McCullough

185. “Take an interest in people. Get to know people. Get to know what they’ve been through before you pass judgment. That’s essential.”

— David McCullough

186. “Every mind should be true to itself – should think, investigate and conclude for itself,” wrote Ingersoll.”

— David McCullough

187. “From ancient times and into the Middle Ages, man had dreamed of taking to the sky, of soaring into the blue like the birds. One savant in Spain in the year 875 is known to have covered himself with feathers in the attempt. Others devised wings of their own design and jumped from rooftops and towers – some to their deaths – in Constantinople, Nuremberg, Perugia.”

— David McCullough

188. “The sorrows of a mother are beyond all human consolation.”

— David McCullough

189. “People then were still inclined to form opinions more from experience than information and it was the experience of most Brooklyn people that between their city and the other one, there was no comparison.”

— David McCullough

190. “For a West Point graduate to abandon his appointed task in the face of adversity or personal discomfort was all but inconceivable.”

— David McCullough

191. “One of my favorite lines from an inaugural address is this – I wonder if you remember who said it? “How can we love our country and not love our countrymen? And loving them, reach out a hand when they fall, heal them when they’re sick, and provide opportunities to make them self-sufficient so they will be equal in fact and not just in theory.” It was said by Ronald Reagan.”

— David McCullough

192. “But even if a person were ignorant of such things, the sight of a moving train held aloft above the great gorge at Niagara by so delicate a contrivance was, in the 1860’s, nothing short of miraculous. The bridge seemed to defy the most fundamental laws of nature. Something so slight just naturally ought to give way beneath anything so heavy. That it did not seemed pure magic.”

— David McCullough

193. “An erect figure, a steady countenance, a neat dress, a genteel air, an oratorical period, a resolute, determined spirit, often do more than deep erudition or indefatigable application.”

— David McCullough

194. “The chief need was skill rather than machinery. It was impossible to fly without both knowledge and skill – of this Wilbur was already certain – and skill came only from experience – experience in the air.”

— David McCullough

195. “Wilbur would remark that if he were to give a young man advice on how to get ahead in life, he would say, “Pick out a good father and mother, and begin life in Ohio.”

— David McCullough

196. “Later, following the funeral, he took all the family’s horses, including his own, up into one of the mountain ravines and shot them.”

— David McCullough

197. “One of the regrets of my life is that I did not study Latin. I’m absolutely convinced, the more I understand these eighteenth century people, that it was that grounding in Greek and Latin that gave them their sense of the classic virtues: the classic ideals of honor, virtue, the good society, and their historic examples of what they could try to live up to.”

— David McCullough

198. “Among those who were about to stake so very much on him and his bridge, or who already had, there was not one who could honestly say he knew the man.”

— David McCullough

199. “Yet there is hardly a more appealing description of the Enlightenment outlook on life and learning than a single sentence in a popular novel of the day, A Sentimental Journey, by Laurence Sterne. What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests his heart in everything.”

— David McCullough

200. “What was most striking about the long course of human events, Truman had concluded from his reading of history, were its elements of continuity, including, above all, human nature, which had changed little if at all through time. “The only new thing in the world is the history you don’t know,” he would one day tell an interviewer.”

— David McCullough