274 Quotes by David McCullough

To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn’t just part of our civic responsibility. To me it’s an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.

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.

When the founders wrote about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they didn’t mean longer vacations and more comfortable hammocks. They meant the pursuit of learning. The pursuit of improvement and excellence. In hard work is happiness.

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.

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.

Take the teacher not the course. Find out who the great professors are – the great teachers – and take their courses because a subject that you may not think you’re interested in may turn out to be infinitely fascinating because of the way it’s taught.

I lament the want of a liberal education. I feel the mist of ignorance to surround me – Nathanael Greene.

Freedom is found through the portals of our nation’s libraries.

I’m drawn particularly to stories that evolve out of the character of the protagonist.