David McCullough Quotes

One must be careful not to prejudge the past.

The present enables us to understand the past, not the other way round.

The historian is a prophet looking bzckwards.

The past has infinite value if one learns from it.

Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.

Predicting the future is very difficult. As a historian I have trouble trying to predict the past.

We are products of the past and its useful to remember that as we move into the future.

Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority of his own point of view, or the more he is prepared to admit the possibility that he may have to learn something, not merely about the thinkers of the past, but from them.

No people ever sees clearly those steps in its own progress, those events in its own life, which future generations will count glorious.

There's a tendency when we write history to do it with the power of hindsight and then assume almost god-like knowledge that nobody living through history has.

My views on music, and life in general, are completely out of step with everything that's going on. I've always been out of step. The only thing that interests me is history, reviewing the past and making something out of it.

You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely tell how it really was.

One gains a double benefit in writing about the past, conjuring up how things might have been, and at the same time acquiring a different perspective on the present.

I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

Ere we can forecast the future we must understand the present and bring a just sense of proportion to our review of the history of the past.

There is always something rather absurd about the past.

Study the past, if you would divine the future.

Such violent propensity have men to complain of the present times.

Nothing changes more constantly than the past

There is but a shallow stream of thought in history.

History is too serious to be left to historians.

We have to go into the past to go further and further into the future.

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

Judicial judgment must take deep account...of the day before yesterday in order that yesterday may not paralyze today.