Top 280 David McCullough Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

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

— David McCullough

158. “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

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

— David McCullough

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

— David McCullough

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

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

— David McCullough

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “But no statistic conveyed a true picture of Panama rain. It had to be seen, to be felt, smelled; it had to be heard to be appreciated. The effect was much as though the heavens had opened and the air had turned instantly liquid.”

— David McCullough

175. “It must not remain our desire only to acquire the art of the bird,” Lilienthal had written. “It is our duty not to rest until we have attained a perfect scientific conception of the problem of flight.”

— David McCullough

176. “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

177. “He wasn’t a hero, or an original thinker. His beliefs were their beliefs, their way of talking was his way of talking. He was on their side. He was one of them. If he stumbled over a phrase or a name, he would grin and try again, and they would smile with.”

— David McCullough

178. “Then, in the way of a fatherly sermon, he added, ‘We learn much by tribulation, and by adversity our hearts are made better.”

— David McCullough

179. “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

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

— David McCullough

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

— David McCullough

182. “Never contradict anybody,” he was advised by Franklin, whom he admired above all men, though it was advice he hardly needed.”

— David McCullough

183. “Later that same spring of 1872, in his own annual report, Roebling would write that most men got over their troubles either by suffering for a long time or “by applying the heroic mode of returning into the caisson at once as soon as pains manifested themselves.”

— David McCullough

184. “The Democratic Party would win in November because the Democratic Party was the people’s party. The Republicans were the party of the privileged few, as always.”

— David McCullough

185. “Roosevelt loved the subtleties of human relations... He was sensitive to nuances in a way that Harry Truman never was and never would be. Truman, with his rural Missouri background, and partly too, because of the limits of his education, was inclined to see things in far simpler terms, as right or wrong, wise or foolish. He dealt little in abstractions.”

— David McCullough

186. “Oh! Almighty and Everlasting God, Creator of Heaven, Earth and the Universe: Help me to be, to think, to act what is right, because it is right; make me truthful, honest and honorable in all things; make me intellectually honest for the sake of right and honor and without thought of reward to me. Give me the ability to be charitable, forgiving and patient with my fellowmen – help me to understand their motives and their shortcomings – even as Thou understandest mine! Amen, Amen, Amen. Say.”

— David McCullough

187. “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

188. “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

189. “A veteran artist counsels a less experienced one to start a painting using colors in the middle range so that the painter can move to more extreme colors as the work progresses.”

— David McCullough

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

— David McCullough

191. “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

192. “Meanwhile, an article in the September issue of the popular McClure’s Magazine written by Simon Newcomb, a distinguished astronomer and professor at Johns Hopkins University, dismissed the dream of flight as no more than a myth. And were such a machine devised, he asked, what useful purpose could it possibly serve?”

— David McCullough

193. “Not incidentally, the Langley project had cost nearly $70,000, the greater part of it public money, whereas the brothers’ total expenses for everything from 1900 to 1903, including materials and travel to and from Kitty Hawk, came to a little less than $1,000, a sum paid entirely from the modest profits of their bicycle business.”

— David McCullough

194. “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

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

— David McCullough

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

— David McCullough

197. “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

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

— David McCullough

199. “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

200. “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