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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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David McCullough
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: July 7
Author
Biographer
Historian
Journalist
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
David Gaub McCullough
David G. McCullough
Generation
Questions
Generations
Biases
Asks
Peel
Past
Blinded
Today
Provocative
Back
Richer
Enables

More quotes by David McCullough

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Freedom is found through the portals of our nation's libraries.
David McCullough
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If the attitude of the teacher toward the material is positive, enthusiastic, committed and excited, the students get that. If the teacher is bored, students get that and they get bored, quickly, instinctively.
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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Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard.
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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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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Napoleon could never imagine that some people loved their country as much as he loved his own.
David McCullough
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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
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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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It was an utterly phenomenal achievement.
David McCullough
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Nobody ever lived in the past.
David McCullough
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I love Dickens. I love the way he sets a scene.
David McCullough
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I feel that what I do is a calling. I would pay to do what I do if I had to. I will never live long enough to do the work I want to do: the books I would like to write, the ideas I would like to explore.
David McCullough
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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
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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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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.
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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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
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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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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