{"author":"David McCullough","author_id":"David+McCullough","total_quotes":49,"quotes":[{"text":"My next book is also set in the eighteenth century. It's about the Revolution, with the focus on the year 1776. It's about Washington and the army and the war. It's the nadir, the low point of the United States of America.","author":"David McCullough","tags":["focus","america","book "],"id":568,"author_id":"David+McCullough"},{"text":"Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives. - John Adams.","author":"David McCullough","tags":["country","patriotism","political","service"],"id":1063,"author_id":"David+McCullough"},{"text":"A veteran artist counsels a less experienced one to start a painting using colors in the middle range so that the painter can move to more extreme colors as the work progresses.","author":"David McCullough","tags":["emotions","moderation","self-discipline"],"id":13211,"author_id":"David+McCullough"},{"text":"Morality only is eternal. All the rest is balloon and bubble from the cradle to the grave.","author":"David McCullough","tags":["truth"],"id":18175,"author_id":"David+McCullough"},{"text":"Let the children have their night of fun and laughter. Let the gifts of Father Christmas delight their play. Let us grown-ups share to the full in their unstinted pleasures before we turn again to the stern task and the formidable years that lie before us, resolved that, by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world.' Winston Churchill Christmas Eve Message, 1941 as printed in 'In the Dark Streets Shineth.","author":"David McCullough","tags":["children","christmas","hope"],"id":32527,"author_id":"David+McCullough"},{"text":"History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.","author":"David McCullough","tags":["why","way","navigation "],"id":41699,"author_id":"David+McCullough"},{"text":"Any nation that expects to be ignorant and free,' Jefferson said, 'expects what never was and never will be.' And if the gap between the educated and the uneducated in America continues to grow as it is in our time, as fast as or faster than the gap between the rich and the poor, the gap between the educated and the uneducated is going to be of greater consequence and the more serious threat to our way of life. We must not, by any means, misunderstand that.","author":"David McCullough","tags":["education"],"id":43546,"author_id":"David+McCullough"},{"text":"The author perceptively outlines what might be an underrated aspect of his subject and of many others whose public achievements are of note – a 'gift for friendship'. McCullough says Adams, despite his towering intellect and curmudgeonly demeanor, had a soft heart for other people and a genuine interest in their particulars.","author":"David McCullough","tags":["curiosity","friendliness","friendship","graciousness"],"id":80746,"author_id":"David+McCullough"},{"text":"To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.'; NEH 2003 Jefferson Lecturer interview profile].","author":"David McCullough","tags":["civic-duty","civic-responsibility","history","humanity","life","mankind","responsibility"],"id":85011,"author_id":"David+McCullough"},{"text":"Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so. ","author":"David McCullough","tags":["clarity","creative-process","precision","thinking","thought","writing"],"id":90652,"author_id":"David+McCullough"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":49,"pages":5,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}