Top 280 David McCullough Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “To what object are my views directed?” he asked. “Am I grasping at money, or scheming for power?” Yes, he was amassing a library, but to what purpose? “Fame, fortune, power say some, are the ends intended by a library. The service of God, country, clients, fellow men, say others. Which of these lie nearest my heart?”

— David McCullough

202. “Not all pioneers went west.”

— David McCullough

203. “Jefferson saw history as largely a chronicle of mistakes to be avoided.”

— David McCullough

204. “By the close of summer, with increasing losses from disease, desertions, and absences of one sort or other, his army was in serious decline. Spirits suffered. The patriotic fervor that had sent thousands rushing to the scene in late April and May was hardly evident any longer.”

— David McCullough

205. “The author perceptively outlines what might be an underrated aspect of his subject and of many others whose public achievements are of note – a “gift for friendship”. McCullough says Adams, despite his towering intellect and curmudgeonly demeanor, had a soft heart for other people and a genuine interest in their particulars.”

— David McCullough

206. “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

207. “I pray heaven,” Adams wrote, “to bestow the best of blessings on this house, and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.”

— David McCullough

208. “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

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

— David McCullough

210. “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

211. “You will ever remember that all the end of study is to make you a good man and a useful citizen,” Adams.”

— David McCullough

212. “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

213. “We learn much by tribulation, and by adversity our hearts are made better.”

— David McCullough

214. “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

215. “The bicycle was proclaimed a boon to all mankind, a thing of beauty, good for the spirits, good for health and vitality, indeed one’s whole outlook on life. Doctors enthusiastically approved. One Philadelphia physician, writing in The American Journal of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women and Children, concluded from his observations that “for physical exercise for both men and women, the bicycle is one of the greatest inventions of the nineteenth century.”

— David McCullough

216. “The author perceives nuances of Abigail Adams’ character in the occasional errors she makes in readily quoting John Milton. Rather than giving the observer a reason to quibble, they are evidence that she had absorbed Milton’s works enough to feel comfortable quoting them from memory.”

— David McCullough

217. “Pen, ink, and paper and a sitting posture are great helps to attention and thinking.”

— David McCullough

218. “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

219. “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

220. “The best dividends on the labor invested have invariably come from seeking more knowledge rather than more power.” Signed Wilbur and Orville Wright, March 12, 1906.”

— David McCullough

221. “Crucial to Lee’s plan was the defense of that part of Long Island directly across the East River and particularly the imposing river bluffs near the tiny hamlet called Brooklyn, which was also spelled Breucklyn, Brucklyn, Broucklyn, Brookland, or Brookline, and amounted to no more than seven or eight houses and an old Dutch church that stood in the middle of the Jamaica Road, the main road inland from the Brooklyn ferry landing.”

— David McCullough

222. “The sunsets, he told her, were the most beautiful he had ever seen, the clouds lighting up in all colors, the stars at night so bright he could read his watch by them.”

— David McCullough

223. “Hardly a soul spoke a word of English. All this they had been forewarned about, but the difference between what one had been told and what one came to understand firsthand was enormous.”

— David McCullough

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

— David McCullough

225. “He was the first one on deck in the morning and generally the last to leave at night, and once, when nearly every passenger was miserably seasick and lay groaning in his berth, Roebling, his head spinning, his stomach churning, was resolutely walking the deck. The malady, he rationalized, “involves no danger at all,” noting that “a cheerful carefree disposition and a manly, vigorous spirit will have great influence on the sickness.” For.”

— David McCullough

226. “Have the courage to say I do not know.”

— David McCullough

227. “Harry Truman used to talk of Potomac Fever, an endemic disorder the symptoms of which were a swelled head and a general decline of common sense.”

— David McCullough

228. “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

229. “The philosophy that with sufficient knowledge all could be explained held no appeal. All could not be explained, Adams had come to understand. Mystery was essential.”

— David McCullough

230. “We’re all what we read to a very considerable degree.”

— David McCullough

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

— David McCullough

232. “Learning the secret of flight from a bird,” Orville would say, “was a good deal like learning the secret of magic from a magician.”

— David McCullough

233. “Why was it that a nation without wars to fight seemed to lose its honor and integrity, Adams pondered in one letter to Rush. “War necessarily brings with it some virtues, and great and heroic virtues, too,” he wrote. “What horrid creatures we men are, that we cannot be virtuous without murdering one another?” Thousands.”

— David McCullough

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

237. “They could imitate every movement of the wings of those gannets; we thought they were crazy, but we just had to admire the way they could move their arms this way and that and bend their elbows and wrist bones up and down and which way, just like the gannets.”

— David McCullough

238. “To his own children he was at once the ultimate voice of authority and, when time allowed, their most exuberant companion. He never fired their imaginations or made them laugh as their mother could, but he was unfailingly interested in them, sympathetic, confiding, entering into their lives in ways few fathers ever do. It was a though he was in league with them.”

— David McCullough

239. “The problem, as Thornton Wilder said, lies in the effort to employ the past tense in such a way that it does not rob those events of their character of having occurred in freedom.”

— David McCullough

240. “A man who has not better government of his tongue, no more command of his temper, is unfit for everything but children’s play and the company of boys.”

— David McCullough

241. “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

242. “Bright but not distinctive as an undergraduate, he had gone to Harvard Law School and finished in the same class as Justice Holmes. But the law bored him – as it had Ferdinand de Lesseps, as it had Roosevelt – so he had decided to be an engineer, “that I may lead a good and useful life.”

— David McCullough

243. “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

244. “Bicycles were proclaimed morally hazardous. Until now children and youth were unable to stray very far from home on foot. Now, one magazine warned, fifteen minutes could put them miles away. Because of bicycles, it was said, young people were not spending the time they should with books, and more seriously that suburban and country tours on bicycles were “not infrequently accompanied by seductions.”

— David McCullough

245. “Wilbur, as George Spratt once told Octave Chanute, was “always ready to oppose an idea expressed by anybody,” ready to “jump into an argument with both sleeves rolled up.” And as Wilbur himself would explain to Spratt, he believed in “a good scrap.” It brought out “new ways of looking at things,” helped “round off the corners.” It was characteristic of all his family, Wilbur said, to be able to see the weak points of anything.”

— David McCullough

246. “There was a burst of applause when George Washington entered and walked to the dais. More applause followed on the appearance of Thomas Jefferson, who had been inaugurated Vice President upstairs in the Senate earlier that morning, and “like marks of approbation” greeted John Adams, who on his entrance in the wake of the two tall Virginians seemed shorter and more bulky even than usual.”

— David McCullough

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

— David McCullough

248. “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

249. “When a general complained about the morale of his troops, observed George Marshall, the time had come for the general to look to his own morale.”

— David McCullough

250. “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