Top 280 David McCullough Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “You will ever remember that all the end of study is to make you a good man and a useful citizen,” Adams.”

— David McCullough

202. “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

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

— David McCullough

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

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

— David McCullough

208. “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

209. “In their allegiance to the King and to the rule of law, they saw themselves as the true American patriots. They had wanted no part of the rebellion.”

— David McCullough

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

— David McCullough

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

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

— David McCullough

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

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

— David McCullough

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

— David McCullough

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

233. “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

234. “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

235. “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

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

— David McCullough

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

240. “Had they taken a poll in Philadelphia in 1776, they would have scrapped the whole idea of independence. A third of the country was for it, a third of the country was against it, and the remaining third, in the old human way, was waiting to see who came out on top.”

— David McCullough

241. “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

242. “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

243. “There was no opiate like a French pillow.”

— David McCullough

244. “Why would anyone wish to be provincial in time, any more than being tied down to one place through life, when the whole reach of the human drama is there to experience in some of the greatest books ever written.”

— David McCullough

245. “It is very bad policy to ask one flying machine man about the experiments of another, because every flying machine man thinks that his method is the only correct one.”

— David McCullough

246. “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

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

— David McCullough

248. “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

249. “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

250. “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