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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.

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
Thinking
Minds
Mask
People
Subjects
Relax
Age
Wearing
Lives
Pick
Biographical
Speak
Picks
Candor
Best
Tend
Masks
Mind
Older
Ripe
Think
Subject
Dropping

More quotes by David McCullough

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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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Courage is contagious. If a leader shows courage, others get the idea.
David McCullough
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Never assume that people in positions of responsibility are behaving responsibly.
David McCullough
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They must be cool but determined...he threatened instant death to any man who showed cowardice.
David McCullough
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I am adamant that we must not cut back on funding of the teaching of the arts in the schools: music, painting, theater, dance, all of it. The great thing about the arts is that the only way you learn how to do it is by doing it.
David McCullough
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Freedom is found through the portals of our nation's libraries.
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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You have overburdened your argument with ostentatious erudition.
David McCullough
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It would be the most crucial day of the entire war.
David McCullough
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Home is really where education does begin.
David McCullough
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Read. Read. Read. Read. Read great books. Read poetry, history, biography. Read the novels that have stood the test of time. And read closely.
David McCullough
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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
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The more we see the founders as humans the more we can understand them.
David McCullough
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The evil of technology was not technology itself, Lindbergh came to see after the war, not in airplanes or the myriad contrivances of modern technical igenuity, but in the extent to which they can distance us from our better moral nature, or sense of personal accountability.
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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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
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First of all, you can make the argument that there's no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past.
David McCullough
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Your education never stops and college is just the beginning. You come out of college with a huge advantage in that you've ideally and more times than not you've come out with a love of learning and that's what matters above all.
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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The talent, including the talent for history - and I do think there are people who just have a talent for it, the way you have a talent for public speaking or music or whatever - it shouldn't be allowed to lie dormant. It should be brought alive.
David McCullough