David McCullough Quotes - Page 2

History isn't just what happened, but what happened to whom and why and what would have been different if the cast of characters had been different.

Why limit yourself to the experience of your own relatively brief time on earth, according to your biological clock, when the whole realm of the human experience reaching back infinitely far is available to you?

I think it's best to pick a biographical subject who lives to a ripe old age. Older people tend to relax and speak their minds. They're dropping some of the masks that they've been wearing. There's a candor.

Exercise free will and creative, independent thought not for the satisfactions they will bring you, but for the good they will do others, the rest of the 6.8 billion–and those who will follow them. And then you too will discover the great and curious truth of the human experience is that selflessness is the best thing you can do for yourself. The sweetest joys of life, then, come only with the recognition that you’re not special. Because everyone is.

Real success is finding your life work in the work that you love. That's it. Don't worry about making a living, don't worry about popularity or fame. Make what you do ... count more than what you own.

I think that a good education ought to be in part the idea that ease and joy are not synonymous. Some of the most fulfilling pleasures of life are to be found in work - found in work you love to do, work you want to do, work that makes you want to get out of bed in the morning.

I love to go to the places where things happen. I like to walk the walk and see how the light falls and what winter feels like.

Nothing ever invented provides such sustenance, such infinite reward for time spent, as a good book.

You can't be a full participant in our democracy if you don't know our history.

The year 1776, celebrated as the birth year of the nation and for the signing of the Declaration of Independence, was for those who carried the fight for independence forward a year of all-too-few victories, of sustained suffering, disease, hunger, desertion, cowardice, disillusionment, defeat, terrible discouragement, and fear, as they would never forget, but also of phenomenal courage and bedrock devotion to country, and that, too they would never forget.

There are people who are trying to write history for the general reader who can be quite tedious. That said, I do feel in my heart of hearts that if history isn't well written, it isn't going to be read, and if it isn't read it's going to die.

We are raising a generation of young Americans who are, to a very large degree, historically illiterate. It's not their faults. There's no problem about enlisting their interest in history. None. The problem is the teachers so often have no history in their background.

Develop and protect a moral sensibility and demonstrate the character to apply it. Dream big. Work hard. Think for yourself. Love everything you love, everyone you love, with all your might. And do so, please, with a sense of urgency, for every tick of the clock subtracts from fewer and fewer...

To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.

Your education never stops and college is just the beginning. You come out of college with a huge advantage in that you've ideally and more times than not you've come out with a love of learning and that's what matters above all.

Each generation, we peel back biases that have blinded those before us. The more we know about the past enables us to ask richer and more provocative questions about who we are today.

On Christmas morning when I was a child, my mother would leave a book wrapped at the foot of the bed, which was a hint that Santa had come. It was also her way of keeping us in bed a little longer before we went downstairs. So I've always associated books with happiness and gifts. And they are. I can't get enough of them.

If we think back through our own lives, the subjects that you liked best in school almost certainly were taught by the teachers you liked best. And the teacher you liked best was the teacher who cared about the subject she taught.

Only those who [do] nothing [make] no mistakes.

Let the children have their night of fun and laughter. Let the gifts of Father Christmas delight their play. Let us grown-ups share to the full in their unstinted pleasures before we turn again to the stern task and the formidable years that lie before us, resolved that, by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world." Winston Churchill Christmas Eve Message, 1941 as printed in "In the Dark Streets Shineth.

My wife, the star I steer by.

I think that we need history as much as we need bread or water or love.

In time I began to understand that it's when you start writing that you really find out what you don't know and need to know.

Courage is contagious. If a leader shows courage, others get the idea.

The fulfilling life, the distinctive life, the relevant life, is an achievement... To do whatever you do for no reason other than you love it and believe in its importance.