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"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."
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"Take up the white man's burden - Send forth the best ye breed - Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives' need."
"History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time-and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened."
"History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there."
"Dr. Rex Curry, the professor and attorney from Florida, has debated and largely proven the unavoidable evidence that Hitler's National Socialism was significantly influenced by Bellamy's 'nationalistic' form of 'socialism.' Curry is famous for making the claim that Hitler adopted the 'stiff-arm salute' from Francis and Edward Bellamy."
"But it is a law of life and development in history where two national civilizations meet they fight for ascendancy."
"The only hope is that our civilization will collapse at a certain point, as always happens in history. Then, out of barbarity, a renaissance."
"Three million years! The infinitely crowded panorama of written history, with its empires and its kings, its triumphs and its tragedies, covered barely one thousandth of this appalling span of time."
"Properly speaking, history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race."
Explore more quotes by David McCullough
"First of all, you can make the argument that there's no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past."
"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."
"To go back and read Swift and Defoe and Samuel Johnson and Smollett and Pope - all those people we had to read in college English courses - to read them now is to have one of the infinite pleasures in life."
"There's an awful temptation to just keep on researching. There comes a point where you just have to stop, and start writing."
"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."
"My shorthand answer is that I try to write the kind of book that I would like to read. If I can make it clear and interesting and compelling to me, then I hope maybe it will be for the reader."
"The pull, the attraction of history, is in our human nature. What makes us tick? Why do we do what we do? How much is luck the deciding factor?"
"Every book is a new journey. I never felt I was an expert on a subject as I embarked on a project."
"When I began, I thought that the way one should work was to do all the research and then write the book."
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