Top 280 David McCullough Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Those for whom things came easily usually made less of an effort, not more.”

— David McCullough

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

— David McCullough

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

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

— David McCullough

260. “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

261. “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

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

— David McCullough

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

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

— David McCullough

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

275. “How unpardonable would it have been in you to have turned out a blockhead. How.”

— David McCullough

276. “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

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

— David McCullough

278. “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

279. “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

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

— David McCullough

281. “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

282. “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

283. “Republicans in Washington have a habit of becoming curiously deaf to the voice of the people. They have a hard time hearing what the ordinary people of the country are saying. But they have no trouble at all hearing what Wall Street is saying. They are able to catch the slightest whisper from big business and the special interests.”

— David McCullough

284. “Read books. Try to understand the reason why things happen, why they are as they are. If you see only the surface phenomena, then the world becomes extremely confusing, ever more unsettling. But if the reasons are understood there’s a kind of simplicity that emerges.”

— David McCullough

285. “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

286. “Eustatius in the Caribbean. At present, there was powder.”

— David McCullough

287. “We must bear the atmosphere of the hour,” the President said. “It will pass away.” And like many of McKinley’s instinctive responses, it was the right one.”

— David McCullough

288. “As time would prove, he had written one of the great, enduring documents of the American Revolution. The constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is the oldest functioning written constitution in the world.”

— David McCullough

289. “Read history. By all means read history. We are all where we are, each of us, because others helped.”

— David McCullough

290. “By the time he went to work for James J. Hill in 1889, he had survived Mexican fevers, Indian attack, Upper Michigan mosquitoes, and Canadian blizzards. He had been treed by wolves on one occasion; he.”

— David McCullough

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

— David McCullough

292. “The change from the crowded, stifling hot, noisy confines of the workspace at Dayton to the open reaches of sea and sky on the Outer Banks could hardly have been greater or more welcome. They loved Kitty Hawk. “Every year adds to our comprehension of the wonders of this place,” wrote Orville to Katharine soon after arrival.”

— David McCullough

293. “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