David McCullough Inspiring Quotes
“Government is nothing more than the combined force of society or the united power of the multitude for the peace, order, safety, good, and happiness of the people… There is no king or queen bee distinguished from all the others by size or figure or beauty and variety of colors in the human hive. No man has yet produced any revelation from heaven in his favor, any divine communication to govern his fellow men. Nature throws us all into the world equal and alike…
The preservation of liberty depends upon the intellectual and moral character of the people. As long as knowledge and virtue are diffused generally among the body of a nation it is impossible they should be enslaved.
Ambition is one of the more ungovernable passions of the human heart. The love of power is insatiable and uncontrollable…
There is a danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living wth power to endanger public liberty.”
“There are no people on earth in whom a spirit of enthusiastic zeal is so readily kindled, and burns so remarkably, as Americans”
“But it isn’t true,” Orville responded emphatically, “to say we had no special advantages . . . the greatest thing in our favor was growing up in a family where there was always much encouragement to intellectual curiosity.”
“We learn much by tribulation, and by adversity our hearts are made better.”
“I think that we need history as much as we need bread or water or love.”
“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?”
“The source of our suffering has been our timidity. We have been afraid to think….Let us dare to read, think, speak, write.”
“No harm’s done to history by making it something someone would want to read.”
“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study paintings, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”
“All the money anyone needs is just enough to prevent one from being a burden on others.”
“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.”
“You’ve got to marinate your head, in that time and culture.
You’ve got to become them.”
“You can’t be a full participant in our democracy if you don’t know our history.”
“The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know…do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. This is enough.”
“Nothing ever invented provides such sustenance, such infinite reward for time spent, as a good book.”
“Real success is finding your lifework in the work that you love.”
“History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are. ”
“Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.”
“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.”
“Once upon a time in the dead of winter in the Dakota Territory, Theodore Roosevelt took off in a makeshift boat down the Little Missouri River in pursuit of a couple of thieves who had stolen his prized rowboat. After several days on the river, he caught up and got the draw on them with his trusty Winchester, at which point they surrendered. Then Roosevelt set off in a borrowed wagon to haul the thieves cross-country to justice. They headed across the snow-covered wastes of the Badlands to the railhead at Dickinson, and Roosevelt walked the whole way, the entire 40 miles. It was an astonishing feat, what might be called a defining moment in Roosevelt’s eventful life. But what makes it especially memorable is that during that time, he managed to read all of Anna Karenina. I often think of that when I hear people say they haven’t time to read.”
