David McCullough Quotes - Page 3

If everyone is special, then no one is. If everyone gets a trophy, trophies become meaningless.

Home is really where education does begin.

Every book is a new journey. I never felt I was an expert on a subject as I embarked on a project.

I think it's important to remember that these men are not perfect. If they were marble gods, what they did wouldn't be so admirable. The more we see the founders as humans the more we can understand them.

If you get down about the state of American culture, just remember there are still more public libraries in this country than there are McDonalds.

We still dislike hypocrites. It's a very American characteristic. We still like people who have ideas and who are willing to stand up for what they believe in. We're very forgiving of failures and very willing to give people a second and third chance if they mean to do better and are sorry for what they've done.

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.

I just thank my father and mother, my lucky stars, that I had the advantage of an education in the humanities.

Spotting talent is one of the essential elements of great leadership.

The evil of technology was not technology itself, Lindbergh came to see after the war, not in airplanes or the myriad contrivances of modern technical igenuity, but in the extent to which they can distance us from our better moral nature, or sense of personal accountability.

Curiosity is what separates us from the cabbages. It's accelerative. The more we know, the more we want to know.

My shorthand answer is that I try to write the kind of book that I would like to read. If I can make it clear and interesting and compelling to me, then I hope maybe it will be for the reader.

History is about life. It's awful when the life is squeezed out of it and there's no flavor left, no uncertainties, no horsing around. It always disturbed me how many biographers never gave their subjects a chance to eat. You can tell a lot about people by how they eat, what they eat, and what kind of table manners they have.

People often ask me if I'm working on a book. That's not how I feel. I feel like I work in a book. It's like putting myself under a spell. And this spell, if you will, is so real to me that if I have to leave my work for a few days, I have to work myself back into the spell when I come back. It's almost like hypnosis.

A leader must look and act the part.

There is only one person who can measure your success. That person is you.

When a friend of Abigail and John Adams was killed at Bunker Hill, Abigail's response was to write a letter to her husband and include these words, "My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.

It was a day and age that saw no reason why one could not learn whatever was required - learn vitally anything - by the close study of books.

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.

The most interesting people are never perfect.

The first of all qualities of a general is courage.

You can't love what you don't know much about. You can't convince, stimulate, hold the attention, teach, if you don't know what you're talking about.

To hold the reader's attention, you have to bring the person who's reading the book inside the experience of the time: What was it like to have been alive then? What were these people like as human beings?

The source of our suffering has been our timidity. We have been afraid to think....Let us dare to read, think, speak, write.

I love all sides of the work but that doesn't mean it isn't hard.