David McCullough

With the Truman book, I wrote the entire account of his experiences in World War I before going over to Europe to…

— David McCullough

“Steamboats by this time were becoming a familiar presence on the rivers and coastal waters of America, but not until 1838 did…

— David McCullough

I feel that history is in many ways the most important of all subjects because it is about everything and because it's…

— David McCullough

“Even mighty states and kingdoms are not exempted. If we look into history, we shall find some nations rising from contemptible beginnings…

— David McCullough

History isn't just what happened, but what happened to whom and why and what would have been different if the cast of…

— David McCullough

Nobody ever lived in the past.

— David McCullough

“Only TR openly declared his love for the job. “Nobody ever enjoyed the presidency as I did,” he boasted, and by all…

— David McCullough

“s ships Phoenix and Rose, in the company of three tenders, cast off their moorings at Staten Island and started up the…

— David McCullough

“a people may let a King fall, yet still remain a people, but if a King let his people slip from him,…

— David McCullough

Why limit yourself to the experience of your own relatively brief time on earth, according to your biological clock, when the whole…

— David McCullough

“He worked at a plain, tall desk at which he wrote standing up or perched on a high stool,”

— David McCullough

“Nothing happens in isolation. Everything that happens has consequences. We”

— David McCullough

America faces an enemy who believes in enforced ignorance. And all that we stand for is the open mind, the generous spirit,…

— David McCullough

My shorthand answer is that I try to write the kind of book that I would like to read. If I can…

— David McCullough

“Seen under the microscope, Stegomyia is a creature of striking beauty. Its general color is dark gray, but the thorax is marked…

— David McCullough

“Modern industries are handling the forces of nature on a stupendous scale. . . . Woe to the people who trust these powers to the…

— David McCullough

“When the world is storm-driven and the bad that happens and the worse that threatens are so urgent as to shut out…

— David McCullough

Morality only is eternal. All the rest is balloon and bubble from the cradle to the grave.

— David McCullough

Books can change your life. Some of the most influential people in our lives are characters we meet in books.

— David McCullough

“Lord Bolingbroke, who was an eighteenth-century political philosopher, called history “philosophy taught with examples.”

— David McCullough

Any nation that expects to be ignorant and free," Jefferson said, "expects what never was and never will be." And if the…

— David McCullough

“As time would prove, he had written one of the great, enduring documents of the American Revolution. The constitution of the Commonwealth…

— David McCullough

We must not think of learning as only what happens in schools. It is an extended part of life. The most readily…

— David McCullough

When I began, I thought that the way one should work was to do all the research and then write the book.

— David McCullough

“As Truman saw the presidency, the chief responsibility was to make decisions and he made some of the most difficult and far-reaching…

— David McCullough