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"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?"
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Exlpore more History quotes
"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 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."
"Every book is a new journey. I never felt I was an expert on a subject as I embarked on a project."
"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."
"There's an awful temptation to just keep on researching. There comes a point where you just have to stop, and start writing."
"First of all, you can make the argument that there's no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past."
"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."
"People are so helpful. People will stop what they're doing to show you something, to walk with you through a section of the town, or explain how a suspension bridge really works."
"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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