David McCullough Quotes

The present is only understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity; and the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present.

Those old enough to write their memoirs should not comment on contemporary issues.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot - past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

The only important thing to realise about history is that it all took place in the last five minutes.

The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.

History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.

All history is contemporary history.

The most notable thing about Time is that it is so purely relative. A large amount of reminiscence is, by common consent, conceded to the drowning man; and it is not past belief that one may review an entire courtship while removing one's gloves.

History is contemporary. Your understanding of history confirms what you think of the present. It's not neutral. I would be very surprised if people with a different view of the present, don't take issue with my view of the past. I just hope that people deal with the content of the film.

History is what we would make of it.

History is an antidote to the hubris of the present.

I see things about the present more clearly when I'm looking through the frame of the past: I think it's very hard to assess the present moment that we are in.

The beauty about history is that it's open to perception.

We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.

Someone said, 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know.

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

It's entirely possible that the notion of what is the past, what is the present and what is the future, could change.

Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If it seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin.

You can make the argument that there's no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past. They lived in the present. It is their present, not our present, and they don't know how it's going to come out. They weren't just like we are because they lived in that very different time. You can't understand them if you don't understand how they perceived reality.

What time is it? It is by every star a different time, and each most falsely true.

The only use of knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present.

Historians relate not so much what is done as what they would have believed.

The past isn't useful until its place in the present is found.

Every true history must force us to remember that the past was once as real as the present and as uncertain as the future.

It is good to look to the past to gain appreciation for the present and perspective for the future.