Daily Inspiration Quote by David McCullough

McCullough is puncturing a comforting myth historians love: that rigor is mostly a matter of piling up more facts. The “awful temptation” isn’t laziness; it’s a seductive form of diligence that lets you feel industrious without taking the real risk, which is interpretation. Research is safe. It rewards you with tangible progress, new folders, new notes, a sense that certainty is always one archive box away. Writing, by contrast, forces choices. It turns the infinite into the finite, turns a sprawling past into an argument a reader can actually hold.

The key move in the quote is the moral language. “Temptation” casts endless research as a vice dressed up as virtue. McCullough’s subtext is that over-research can become a way of postponing accountability: once you write, your priorities are visible, your omissions obvious, your narrative architecture open to attack. You can’t hide behind the possibility that one more source will resolve every ambiguity.

Context matters: McCullough built a career on deep reporting married to narrative propulsion, writing history for general readers without talking down to them. He’s speaking from the workshop, not the podium. The point isn’t anti-intellectualism; it’s craft. At a certain stage, “more” evidence doesn’t clarify the story - it just increases the burden of shaping it. His line draws a boundary between collecting and creating, insisting that history only becomes communicable when the historian stops being a custodian of materials and starts being an author.