David McCullough
History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.Collection: History
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.Collection: Experience
Real success is finding you lifework in the work that you love.Collection: Success
I can fairly be called an amateur because I do what I do, in the original sense of the word - for love, because I love it. On the other hand, I think that those of us who make our living writing history can also be called true professionals.Collection: History
May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.
Every book is a new journey. I never felt I was an expert on a subject as I embarked on a project.
You can't be a full participant in our democracy if you don't know our history.
I work very hard on the writing, writing and rewriting and trying to weed out the lumber.
First of all, you can make the argument that there's no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past.
A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia.
I just thank my father and mother, my lucky stars, that I had the advantage of an education in the humanities.
With the Truman book, I wrote the entire account of his experiences in World War I before going over to Europe to follow his tracks in the war. When I got there, there was a certain satisfaction in finding I had it right - it does look like that.
When I read that the British army had landed thirty-two thousand troops - and I had realized, not very long before, that Philadelphia only had thirty thousand people in it - it practically lifted me out of my chair.
When I began, I thought that the way one should work was to do all the research and then write the book.
To go back and read Swift and Defoe and Samuel Johnson and Smollett and Pope - all those people we had to read in college English courses - to read them now is to have one of the infinite pleasures in life.
There's an awful temptation to just keep on researching. There comes a point where you just have to stop, and start writing.
The title always comes last. What I really work hard on is the beginning. Where do you begin? In what tone do you begin? I almost have to have a scene in my mind.
The pull, the attraction of history, is in our human nature. What makes us tick? Why do we do what we do? How much is luck the deciding factor?
People are so helpful. People will stop what they're doing to show you something, to walk with you through a section of the town, or explain how a suspension bridge really works.
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.
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 United States of America.
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.
I'm very aware how many distractions the reader has in life today, how many good reasons there are to put the book down.
I'm drawn particularly to stories that evolve out of the character of the protagonist.
I would pay to do what I do if I had to.
I love Dickens. I love the way he sets a scene.
I love all sides of the work but that doesn't mean it isn't hard.
I had been writing for about twelve years. I knew pretty well how you could find things out, but I had never been trained in an academic way how to go about the research.
No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.
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?Collection: Cost
Climb the mountain so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.Collection: Wisdom
Never assume that people in positions of responsibility are behaving responsibly.Collection: Responsibility
History is not just about dates and quotations. And it's not just about politics, the military and social issues, though much of it of course is about that. It's about everything. It's about life history. It's human. And we have to see it that way. We have to teach it that way. We have to read it that way. It's about art, music, literature, money, science, love - the human experience.Collection: Art
I feel that history is in many ways the most important of all subjects because it is about everything and because it's about who we are and how we came to be the way we are.Collection: Important
However little television you watch, watch less.Collection: Watches
You can make the argument that there's no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past. They lived in the present. It is their present, not our present, and they don't know how it's going to come out. They weren't just like we are because they lived in that very different time. You can't understand them if you don't understand how they perceived reality.Collection: Past
We must not think of learning as only what happens in schools. It is an extended part of life. The most readily available resource for all of life is our public library system.Collection: School
History is not the story of heroes entirely. It is often the story of cruelty and injustice and shortsightedness. There are monsters, there is evil, there is betrayal. That's why people should read Shakespeare and Dickens as well as history ~~ they will find the best, the worst, the height of noble attainment and the depths of depravity.Collection: Betrayal
We are all what we are, in large degree, because of others who have helped, coached, taught, counseled, who set a standard by example, who've taken an interest in our interests, opened doors, opened our minds, helped us see, who gave encouragement when we needed it, who reprimanded or prodded when we needed it, and at critical moments, inspired.Collection: Encouragement
You can't learn to play the piano without playing the piano, you can't learn to write without writing, and, in many ways, you can't learn to think without thinking. Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard.Collection: Writing
Love of learning will never let you down. You can have a quest for money, you can have a quest for power, you can have a quest for fame and they are sometimes gratifying and sometimes self-destructive. The love of learning is always gratifying and never self-destructive. The more educated, the more cultivated a society becomes, better off is everybody.Collection: Self
Real success is finding your lifework in the work that you love.Collection: Love
And read… read all the time… read as a matter of principle, as a matter of self-respect. Read as a nourishing staple of life.Collection: Self
When the founders wrote about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they didn't mean longer vacations and more comfortable hammocks. They meant the pursuit of learning. The pursuit of improvement and excellence. In hard work is happiness.Collection: Hard Work
Read. Read every chance you get. Read to keep growing. Read history. Read poetry. Read for pure enjoyment. Read a book called Life on a Little Known Planet. It's about insects. It will make you feel better.Collection: Reading
The past after all is only another name for someone else's present.Collection: Past
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Independent
The truth isn't just the facts. You can have all the facts imaginable and miss the truth, just as you can have facts missing or some wrong, and reach the larger truth.Collection: Knowledge
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.Collection: Character