David McCullough Quotes

The virtuous will be sure to speak uprightly; but those whose speech is upright may not be virtuous.

Integrity can be neither lost nor concealed nor faked nor quenched nor artificially come by nor outlived, nor, I believe, in the long run, denied.

Fewer possess virtue, than those who wish us to believe that they possess it.

Truth telling is the first building block of character -- a quality that seems to be getting rarer and rarer in all-forgiving America.

We may argue eloquently that 'Honesty is the best Policy' - unfortunately, the moment honesty is adopted for the sake of policy it mysteriously ceases to be honesty.

We must be true to ourselves. And we must be true to others, whether they believe we are or not.

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies.

Let us have integrity and not write checks with our tongues which our conduct cannot cash.

You can live opposite of what you profess, but you cannot live opposite of what you believe.

Honor is honesty to what is, not blind duty to what you wish to be.

No one is perfect but without honesty you've got nothing.

I think that people need to have the courage of their convictions and not be trying to fool people into thinking that they've changed overnight.

One never knows whether people have principles on principle or whether for their own personal satisfaction.

Americans being upright and forthright and honest and true to themselves is a very hard concept.

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.

He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.

Why lie? I'm not going to be a hypocrite and say the opposite of what I think, like some others do.

I don't want to lie. I dislike dishonesty. And I work in Hollywood, a town and a business that relies on a lot of falsehoods with people hiding behind different facades. I don't want to be a part of that.

No man can produce great things who is not thoroughly sincere in dealing with himself.

Sincerity is impossible, unless it pervade the whole being, and the pretence of it saps the very foundation of character.

I do not believe in hypocrisy.

It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.

If we divine a discrepancy between a man's words and his character, the whole impression of him becomes broken and painful; he revolts the imagination by his lack of unity, and even the good in him is hardly accepted.

Liberty is the right of every man to be honest, to think and to speak without hypocrisy.

There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.