David McCullough

Name: John Adams
ISBN: 9780743218290

Historian

1933-07-07 – 2022-08-07

David McCullough was an American historian and biographer known for narrative histories such as Truman and John Adams. He was a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner.

Books by David McCullough

Seventeen Seventy-six
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History Matters
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John Adams
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Quotes by David McCullough

Measurements are never enough. The artist's eye and desire to breathe life into the subject must be the deciding factors.
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Those for whom things came easily usually made less of an effort, not more.
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[While writing history], I've kept the most interesting company imaginable with people long gone. Some I've come to know better than many I know in real life, since in real life we don't get to read other people's mail.
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To his own children he was at once the ultimate voice of authority and, when time allowed, their most exuberant companion. He never fired their imaginations or made them laugh as their mother could, but he was unfailingly interested in them, sympathetic, confiding, entering into their lives in ways few fathers ever do. It was a though he was in league with them.
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No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to
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You can't be a full participant in our democracy if you don't know our history.
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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)
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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 musi
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In an exhibition wherein paintings of nudes were commonplace, that of Madame Gautreau in her black evening dress was considered scandalously erotic. -from The Greater Journey
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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.
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Indeed, bribery, favoritism, and corruption in a great variety of forms were rampant not only in politics, but in all levels of society.
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Nothing ever invented provides such sustenance, such infinite reward for time spent, as a good book.
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Remove yourself, sir!
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The more Adams thought about the future of his country, the more convinced he became that it rested on education. Before any great things are accomplished, he wrote to a correspondent, a memorable change must be made in the system of education and knowledge must become so general as to raise the lower ranks of society nearer to the higher. The education of a nation instead of being confined to a few schools and universities for the instruction of the few, must become the national care and expense for the formation of the many.
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Any nation that expects to be ignorant and free, Jefferson said, expects what never was and never will be. And if the gap between the educated and the uneducated in America continues to grow as it is in our time, as fast as or faster than the gap between the rich and the poor, the gap between the educated and the uneducated is going to be of greater consequence and the more serious threat to our way of life. We must not, by any means, misunderstand that.
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History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.
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Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard., July/Aug. 2002, Vol. 23/No. 4)
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No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read., NEH Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities 2003)
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Let the children have their night of fun and laughter. Let the gifts of Father Christmas delight their play. Let us grown-ups share to the full in their unstinted pleasures before we turn again to the stern task and the formidable years that lie before us, resolved that, by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world. Winston Churchill Christmas Eve Message, 1941 as printed in In the Dark Streets Shineth.
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Morality only is eternal. All the rest is balloon and bubble from the cradle to the grave.
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