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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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"In the legal respect, after the execution of the supposed incendiaries, the other half of Moscow burned down."
"In the parlor was a huge camera on wheels like the ones used in public parks, and the backdrop of a marine twilight, painted with homemade paints, and the walls papered with pictures of children at memorable moments: the first Communion, the bunny costume, the happy birthday. Year after year, during contemplative pauses on afternoons of chess, Dr. Urbino had seen the gradual covering over of the walls, and he had often thought with a shudder of sorrow that in the gallery of casual portraits lay the germ of the future of the city, governed and corrupted by those unknown children, where note even the ashes of his glory would remain."
"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history."
"History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies."
"The opportunity of studying history, is the opportunity to experience empathy."
"Nobody can understand the greatness of the thirteenth century, who does not realize that it was a great growth of new things produced by a living thing. In that sense it was really bolder and freer than what we call the renaissance, which was a resurrection of old things discovered in a dead thing... and the Gospel according to St. Thomas... was a new thrust like the titanic thrust of Gothic engineering; and its strength was in a God that makes all things new."
"Every past is worth condemning."
"Nothing is long ago in an archive, my dear. In the records we treat the dead as same as the living. that's the whole point of keeping papers. It doesn't matter if it's a hundred years or only a few weeks. It's all filed away, fresh as the day it went under the covers."
"Upon examination of a people's history, beware the story teller's motives."
Explore more quotes by David McCullough
"I can fairly be called an amateur because I do what I do, in the original sense of the word - for love, because I love it. On the other hand, I think that those of us who make our living writing history can also be called true professionals."
"I'm very aware how many distractions the reader has in life today, how many good reasons there are to put the book down."
"I just thank my father and mother, my lucky stars, that I had the advantage of an education in the humanities."
"The title always comes last. What I really work hard on is the beginning. Where do you begin? In what tone do you begin? I almost have to have a scene in my mind."
"I had been writing for about twelve years. I knew pretty well how you could find things out, but I had never been trained in an academic way how to go about the research."
"With the Truman book, I wrote the entire account of his experiences in World War I before going over to Europe to follow his tracks in the war. When I got there, there was a certain satisfaction in finding I had it right - it does look like that."
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