Top 280 David McCullough Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “Measurements “are never enough. The artist’s eye and desire to breathe life into the subject must be the deciding factors.”

— David McCullough

253. “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

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

— David McCullough

255. “The title did not make the man, of course, but it enhanced the standing of the man in the eyes of others.”

— David McCullough

256. “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

257. “To be unable to read was the ultimate measure of wretchedness.”

— David McCullough

258. “Boston Latin School.”

— David McCullough

259. “Especially for those who had been with Washington and who knew what a close call it was at the beginning – how often circumstance, storms, contrary winds, the oddities of strengths of individual character had made the difference – the outcome seemed a little short of a miracle.”

— David McCullough

260. “Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind. For years Rush had been investigating the causes of and remedies for madness and other “diseases” of the mind. “The subjects of them have hitherto been enveloped in mystery,” he wrote to Adams. “I have endeavored to bring them down to the level of all other diseases of the human body, and to show that the mind and body are moved by the same causes and subject to the same laws.”

— David McCullough

261. “Well, they’ve made a flight.”

— David McCullough

262. “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

263. “On a medical school professor noted for slowly, carefully interviewing the patient: “He taught the love of truth.”

— David McCullough

264. “Writing again, he stressed that the events of war are always uncertain. Then, paraphrasing a favorite line from the popular play Cato by Joseph Addison – a line that General Washington, too, would often call upon – Adams told her, “We cannot insure success, but we can deserve it.”

— David McCullough

265. “In no way did any of this discourage or deter Wilbur and Orville Wright, any more than the fact that they had had no college education, no formal technical training, no experience working with anyone other than themselves, no friends in high places, no financial backers, no government subsidies, and little money of their own. Or.”

— David McCullough

266. “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

267. “Those for whom things came easily usually made less of an effort, not more.”

— David McCullough

268. “Talk helps shape one’s thoughts.”

— David McCullough

269. “Wright died in his room at home at 7 Hawthorn Street at 3:15 in the morning, Thursday, May 30, 1912. He was forty-five years old.”

— David McCullough

270. “Adams lay peacefully, his mind clear, by all signs. Then late in the afternoon, according to several who were present in the room, he stirred and whispered clearly enough to be understood, “Thomas Jefferson survives.”

— David McCullough

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

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

— David McCullough

275. “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

276. “I steer my bark with hope in the head, leaving fear astern.” Their.”

— David McCullough

277. “When you see one of these graceful crafts sailing over your head, and possibly over your home, as I expect you will in the near future, see if you don’t agree with me that the flying machine is one of God’s most gracious and precious gifts.”

— David McCullough

278. “Some serious Christians may possibly tremble for the Ark, and think the Christian religion in danger when divested of the patronage of civil power. They may fear inroads from licentiousness and infidelity, on the one hand, and from sectaries and party divisions on the other. But we may dismiss our fears, when we consider that truth can never be in real hazard, where there is a sufficiency of light and knowledge, and full liberty to vindicate it.”

— David McCullough

279. “He asked for national compulsory health insurance to be funded by payroll deductions. Under the system, all citizens would receive medical and hospital service irrespective of their ability to pay. And.”

— David McCullough

280. “But Brooklyn, in fact, was the third-largest city in America and had been for some time. It was a major manufacturing center – for glass, steel, tinware, marble mantels, hats, buggy whips, chemicals, cordage, whiskey, beer, glue. It was a larger seaport than New York, a larger city than Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, and growing faster than any of them – faster even than.”

— David McCullough

281. “Business is merely a form of warfare in which each combatant strives to get the business away from his competitors and at the same time keep them from getting what he already has.”

— David McCullough

282. “He always kept three books at hand – one scientific, one of classical literature or history, one light fiction – which he took up in turn, giving each exactly twenty minutes according to a pocket watch placed on the table beside his chair. In this fashion, he said, he was able to remember what he read.”

— David McCullough

283. “It is almost a reconciliation to having my leg broken to contemplate the amount of reading I am going to do this summer. I am getting better fast and I am afraid I’ll get well so soon I won’t get to read enough.”

— David McCullough

284. “Thus began the Bulloch line in America, the annals of which, by Mittie’s time, included one noted.”

— David McCullough

285. “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

286. “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

287. “The happiness of the people was the purpose of government, he wrote, and therefore that form of government was best which produced the greatest amount of happiness for the largest number. And since all “sober inquirers after truth” agreed that happiness derived from virtue, that form of government with virtue as its foundation was more likely than any other to promote the general happiness.”

— David McCullough

288. “If a boy finds he can make a few articles with his hands, it tends to make him rely on himself. And the planning that is necessary for the execution of the work is a discipline and an education of great value to him.”

— David McCullough

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

— David McCullough

290. “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

291. “On July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong, another American born and raised in western Ohio, stepped onto the moon, he carried with him, in tribute to the Wright brothers, a small swatch of the muslin from a wing of their 1903 Flyer.”

— David McCullough

292. “Today’s prime fact is war,” Henry Stimson had said at the start of one Interim.”

— David McCullough

293. “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