David McCullough Quotes

We can't afford to deny our past in a bid to be empowered. But what we can do is contextualize the past.

Know thy history. Let it horrify you; let it inspire you.

I am much more interested in defending my ideas than defending my identities.

If you don't know your full-throttle history, the whole story of how you came to where you are, it's kind of hard to put things together.

I studied psychology, history, and religion. I was a heady girl, but frankly, I'm glad I studied those subjects because a lot of that has really helped me as an actress.

It's important to have people who will question you occasionally.

If you read enough biography and history, you learn how people have dealt successfully or unsuccessfully with similar situations or patterns in the past. It doesn't give you a template of answers, but it does help you refine the questions you have to ask yourself.

I think '12 Years a Slave' really helped me, as a person and as a student, to grow.

I've grown into a woman and formed my own opinions about the world around me.

In order to see where we are going, we not only must remember where we have been, but we must understand where we have been.

Knowing who you are is good for one generation only. You haven't the foggiest idea where you stand now or who you are

I look at the past and I see myself.

I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.

It is a great pleasure to transport one's-self into the spirit of the times; to see how a wise man has thought before us, and to what a glorious height we have at last carried it.

How can we know who we are and where we are going if we don't know anything about where we have come from and what we have been through, the courage shown, the costs paid, to be where we are?

Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems.

People must know the past to understand the present, and to face the future.

To find out what we presently are and where we are going, we must know what we have been and what others have done; and this, because the humanities are at once the creation and the interpreters of the past, is the great purpose of humanistic scholarship.

Books are, at their heart, dangerous. Yes, dangerous. Because they challenge us: our prejudices, our blind spots. They open us to new ideas, new ways of seeing. They make us hurt in all the right ways. They can push down the barricades of ‘them’ & widen the circle of ‘us.

After all, memory may be the only thing on earth we can truly manipulate to serve us, so we don't have to look back at ourselves in the receding past and think, What an arsehole!

The only man who knows just what he thinks at the present moment is the man who hasn't done any new thinking in the past ten years.

In the history of the collective as in the history of the individual, everything depends on the development of consciousness.

The ego is as you think of yourself. You in relation to all the commitments of your life, as you understand them. The self is the whole range of possibilities that you've never even thought of. And you're stuck with you're past when you're stuck with the ego. Because if all you know about yourself is what you found out about yourself, well, that already happened. The self is a whole field of potentialities to come through.

You can't kill the past by denying the past. You can kill it only by making it obsolete. And even in that, you have to find honor in the past. You can't hack off pieces of yourself, and expect them to grow again.

Power is knowing your past.