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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.
David McCullough
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David McCullough
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: July 7
Author
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Historian
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Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
David Gaub McCullough
David G. McCullough
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History
More quotes by David McCullough
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.
David McCullough
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.
David McCullough
A leader must look and act the part.
David McCullough
Unlike the people you see in Mathew Brady's photographs from the Civil War, the men and women of the Revolution seem more like characters in a costume pageant. And it's a pageant in which the performers are all handsome as stage actors, with uniforms and dress that are always costume perfect.
David McCullough
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
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
There are people who are trying to write history for the general reader who can be quite tedious. That said, I do feel in my heart of hearts that if history isn't well written, it isn't going to be read, and if it isn't read it's going to die.
David McCullough
I think that a good education ought to be in part the idea that ease and joy are not synonymous. Some of the most fulfilling pleasures of life are to be found in work - found in work you love to do, work you want to do, work that makes you want to get out of bed in the morning.
David McCullough
Curiosity is what separates us from the cabbages. It's accelerative. The more we know, the more we want to know.
David McCullough
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
You've got to marinate your head, in that time and culture. You've got to become them. (Speaking about researching, and reading, and immersing yourself in History)
David McCullough
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
To this noble end the delegates had pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.
David McCullough
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
I'm absolutely positive it's in our human nature to want to know about the past. The two most popular movies of all time, while not historically accurate, are about core historic events: 'Gone With the Wind' and 'Titanic.'
David McCullough
Find something to do that you love because then the work itself is always the reward not the recompense. And if you love what you're doing you probably do better at it than doing something you don't love and therefore you'll be compensated appropriately.
David McCullough
It was an utterly phenomenal achievement.
David McCullough
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
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.
David McCullough
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.
David McCullough
