David McCullough Quotes

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

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

David McCullough

Tags: books

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...

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...

David McCullough

Tags: civic duty, civic responsibility, history, humanity, life, mankind, responsibility

About Author

David Gaub McCullough (; July 7, 1933 – August 7, 2022) was an American popular historian. He was a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. In 2006, he was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian award. Born and raised in Pittsburgh, McCullough earned a degree in English literature from Yale University. His first book was The Johnstown Flood (1968), and he wrote nine more on such topics as Harry S. Truman, John Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Panama Canal, and the Wright brothers. McCullough also narrated numerous documentaries, such as The Civil War by Ken Burns, as well as the 2003 film Seabiscuit, and he hosted the PBS television documentary series American Experience for twelve years.McCullough's two Pulitzer Prize-winning books—Truman and John Adams—were adapted by HBO into a TV film and a miniseries, respectively.

David McCullough Quotes

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

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...

About Author

As the Sword was the last resort for the preservation of our liberties, so it ought to be the first thing laid aside when those liberties are firmly established

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...

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

Remove yourself, sir!

Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard.

The man who wishes to keep at the problem long enough to really learn anything positively must not take dangerous risks. Carelessness and overconfidence are usually more dangerous than deliberately ac...

The French dine to gratify, we to appease appetite, observed John Sanderson. We demolish dinner, they eat it. The general misconception back home was that French food was highly seasoned, but not at a...

No bird soars in a calm. WILBUR WRIGHT

So, it was done, the break was made, in words at least: on July 2, 1776, in Philadelphia, the American colonies declared independence. If not all thirteen clocks had struck as one, twelve had, and wit...

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.

Your father’s zeal for books will be one of the last desires which will quit him, Abigail observed to John Quincy

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

Unfaithfulness in public stations is deeply criminal [he wrote to Abigail]. But there is no encouragement to be faithful. Neither profit, nor honor, nor applause is acquired by faithfulness. . . . The...

My next book is also set in the eighteenth century. It's about the Revolution, with the focus on the year 1776. It's about Washington and the army and the war. It's the nadir, the low point of the Uni...

How can we know who we are and where we are going if we don't know anything about where we have come from and what we have been through, the courage shown, the costs paid, to be where we are?

Many of them were familiar from childhood with the fables of La Fontaine. Or they had read Voltaire or Racine or Molière in English translations. But that was about the sum of any familiarity they had...

It is in Paris that the beating of Europe’s heart is felt. Paris is the city of cities. - Victor Hugo

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 constitutio...