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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?

David McCullough

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David McCullough
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: July 7
Author
Biographer
Historian
Journalist
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
David Gaub McCullough
David G. McCullough
Paid
Cost
Courage
Anything
Come
Going
Shown
Costs

More quotes by David McCullough

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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.
David McCullough
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America faces an enemy who believes in enforced ignorance. And all that we stand for is the open mind, the generous spirit, the ideal of tolerance, freedom, education, opportunity.
David McCullough
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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.
David McCullough
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I want people to see that all-important time in a different way-in the way it was. For of a number of reasons, including the absence of photographs, we tend to see the men and women of the Revolution as not quite real. And we have far too little sense of what they suffered.
David McCullough
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Freedom is found through the portals of our nation's libraries.
David McCullough
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There are no people on earth in whom a spirit of enthusiastic zeal is so readily kindled, and burns so remarkably, as Americans
David McCullough
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My wife, the star I steer by.
David McCullough
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History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.
David McCullough
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The most interesting people are never perfect.
David McCullough
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My strong feeling is that we must learn more about how we learn. I'm convinced that we learn by struggling to find the solution to a problem on our own with some guidance, but getting in and getting our hands dirty and working it.
David McCullough
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The more we see the founders as humans the more we can understand them.
David McCullough
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Never assume that people in positions of responsibility are behaving responsibly.
David McCullough
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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.
David McCullough
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I lament the want of a liberal education. I feel the mist of ignorance to surround me - Nathanael Greene
David McCullough
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Napoleon could never imagine that some people loved their country as much as he loved his own.
David McCullough
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You can't be a full participant in our democracy if you don't know our history.
David McCullough
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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.
David McCullough
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There's no such thing as a foreseeable future.
David McCullough
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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.
David McCullough
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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.
David McCullough