David McCullough Quotes

While I complain of being able to glimpse no more than the shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as it is taking shape at this very moment, since I have not reached the stage of development at which I would be capable of perceiving it. A few hundred years hence, in this same place, another traveller, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see.

A mistake constantly made by those who should know better is to judge people of the past by our standards rather than their own. The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.

The reality we live in is selected by our conceptual definitions. You and I may be in the same physical space, but each of us will see it as entirely different.

Don't judge the past by the standards of today. It won't work. They're incompatible.

Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.

Time can also be a place.... Everything depends on where you are standing, on where you look or what you hear. The measure of it is found in consciousness itself.

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present. It requires feeling its own pressure on your pulses without any ex post facto illumination.

We are perhaps too near the age of transition to see clearly the interplay of all that made for progress. Each of us has had his own peculiar training, his own personal contact with the mighty ones of the immediate past; and this forms as it were a telescopic tube determining limits to our field of vision. No doubt we may range the whole horizon; but after all we look from our own point of vantage.

Something of great importance now past is inferior to something of little importance now present, in that the latter is a reality, and related to the former as something to nothing.

If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.

What we call the present is given shape by an accumulation of the past.

Whenever someone asks me about fantasy versus realism, I'm like, "I don't know, guys. Did we not all just descend into some underworld, watch strangers from our past kaleidoscope through us according to some pattern that is both illogical and has its own strange melting truth, and then wake up and have a Pop-Tart?" Why are we talking about fantasy and reality like they're opposed?

Life is whatever we conceive it to be.

We think we’re in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past.

We make a mistake to condescend to the past as if it were preparatory to our own time.

NOW is the only reality. All else is either memory or imagination.

A year's a long time, but it also flickers past in no time at all.

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.

Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. But who could know? Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant.

A moment was not a single moment at all, but rather an infinite number of different moments, depending on who was seeing things and how.

The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything.

The past assumes the nature of the present.

The problem is when you try to impose today's standards on people living back then. It's the politically correct thing to do, but it was a different era, a different country then.

History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past