Candice Millard > Quotes

“The ordinary traveler, who never goes off the beaten route and who on this beaten route is carried by others, without himself doing anything or risking anything, does not need to show much more initiative and intelligence than an express package," Roosevelt sneered.”
― Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

“Garfield's shooting had also revealed to the American people how vulnerable they were. In the little more than a century since its inception, the United States had become a powerful and respected country. Yet Americans suddenly realized that they still had no real control over their own fate. Not only could they not prevent a tragedy of such magnitude, they couldn't even anticipate it. The course of their lives could be changed in an instant, by a man who did not even understand what he had done.”
― Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should not grow old. JAMES A. GARFIELD”
― Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“She (the First Lady, entering the room with her gravely wounded husband) would admit fear but not despair.”
― Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“Of course a man has to take advantage of his opportunities, but the opportunities have to come,” he told an audience in Cambridge, England, in the spring of 1910. “If there is not the war, you don’t get the great general; if there is not the great occasion, you don’t get the great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in times of peace, no one would know his name now.”
― Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

“In Garfield’s experience, education was salvation. It had freed him from grinding poverty. It had shaped his mind, forged paths, created opportunities where once there had been none. Education, he knew, led to progress, and progress was his country’s only hope of escaping its own painful past. In”
― Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“Roosevelt wrote, “Tell Osborn I have already lived and enjoyed as much of life as any nine other men I know; I have had my full share, and if it is necessary for me to leave my bones in South America, I am quite ready to do so.”
― Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

“Dr. Lister, who treated the wounded Pres. Garfield, had been so stung by the medical establishment's reaction to his embrace of African-American doctors that he, in response, refused to do part from the status quo enough to considering using antiseptic techniques.”
― Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“When he arrived, he found that the two most important women in his life—his mother and his young wife—were dying. At 3:00 a.m. on February 14, Valentine’s Day, Martha Roosevelt, still a vibrant, dark-haired Southern belle at forty-six, died of typhoid fever. Eleven hours later, her daughter-in-law, Alice Lee Roosevelt, who had given birth to Theodore’s first child just two days before, succumbed to Bright’s disease, a kidney disorder. That night, in his diary, Roosevelt marked the date with a large black “X” and a single anguished entry: “The light has gone out of my life.”
― Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

“Although Churchill had been called many things—opportunist, braggart, blowhard—no one had ever questioned his bravery. “Winston is like a strong wire that, stretched, always springs back. He prospers under attack, enmity and disparagement,” Atkins would later write of him. “He lives on excitement….The more he scents frustration the more he has to fight for; the greater the obstacles, the greater the triumph.” Surrounded”
― Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill

“There is a universal saying to the effect that it is when men are off in the wilds that they show themselves as they really are,”
― Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

“during his first year at the Eclectic that, by his second year, the school had promoted him from janitor to assistant professor.”
― Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“The more I study religion,” he wrote, “the more I am convinced that man never worshiped anyone but himself.”
― Candice Millard, River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile

“Theologians in all ages have looked out admiringly upon the material universe and … demonstrated the power, wisdom, and goodness of God; but we know of no one who has demonstrated the same attributes from the history of the human race.”
― Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“Quiet is no certain pledge of permanence and safety. Trees may flourish and flowers may bloom upon the quiet mountain side, while silently the trickling rain-drops are filling the deep cavern behind its rocky barriers, which, by and by, in a single moment, shall hurl to wild ruin its treacherous peace.”
― Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“There is no horizontal Stratification of society in this country like the rocks in the earth, that hold one class down below forevermore, and let another come to the surface to stay there forever. Our Stratification is like the ocean, where every individual drop is free to move, and where from the sternest depths of the mighty deep any drop may come up to glitter on the highest wave that rolls. JAMES A. GARFIELD”
― Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“Roosevelt had never allowed himself to fear death, famously writing, “Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die.” From a very young age, he had been prepared to die in order to live the life he wanted. When a doctor at Harvard told him that his heart was weak and would not hold out for more than a few years unless he lived quietly, he had replied that he preferred an early death to a sedentary life.”
― Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

“Theodore you have the mind but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. I am giving you the tools, but it is up to you to make your body.”
― Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

“Always more audacity.”
― Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill

“The author points out strikingly different reactions to calamity. While many passengers of a devastating shipwreck were thankful to be alive, future presidential assassin Charles Guiteau saw his being spared as proof of his exceptionalism rather than of the grace from which he benefited.”
― Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“There are times in the history of men and nations, when they stand so near the veil that separates mortals and immortals, time from eternity, and men from their God, that they can almost hear their breathings and feel the pulsations of the heart of the infinite. JAMES A. GARFIELD”
― Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“Even more complex and dangerous than the river itself were the fishes, mammals, and reptiles that inhabited it. Like the rain forest that surrounds and depends upon it, the Amazon river system is a prodigy of speciation and diversity, serving as home to more than three thousand species of freshwater fishes—more than any other river system on earth. Its waters are crowded with creatures of nearly every size, shape, and evolutionary adaptation, from tiny neon tetras to thousand-pound manatees to pink freshwater boto dolphins to stingrays to armor-plated catfishes to bullsharks. By comparison, the entire Missouri and Mississippi river system that drains much of North America has only about 375 fish”
― Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

“Tonight, I am a private citizen. To-morrow I shall be called to assume new responsibilities, and on the day after, the broadside of the world’s wrath will strike. It will strike hard. I know it, and you will know it.”
― Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“Although Churchill was quick to believe every good thing ever said about his potential, he wasn’t willing to leave anything to chance.”
― Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill

“he had dangerous enemies and problematic friends,”
― Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“When he wasn't too sick to sit up, Roosevelt sought comfort and distraction in the world that he knew best: his library. For his trip to Africa, he had spent months choosing the books that he would take with him, ordering special volumes that had been beautifully bound in pigskin, with type reduced to the smallest legible size, so that the books would be as light as possible. Roosevelt, Kermit wrote, "read so rapidly that he had to plan very carefully in order to have enough books to last him through a trip.”
― Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

“In fact, Secret Service agents would not be officially assigned to protect the president until after William McKinley was shot in Buffalo, New York, on September 6, 1901. The day McKinley was shot—he would die from his wounds eight days later—Robert Todd Lincoln was once again standing with the president, thus earning the dubious distinction of being the only man to be present at three of our nation’s four presidential assassinations.”
― Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“As Bell stood in silence, watching the judges turn their backs to him and begin to walk away, he suddenly heard a familiar voice. “How do you do, Mr. Bell?” Surprised, he turned to find Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil, his full, white beard neatly trimmed, his deep-set eyes bright with curiosity, looking directly at him. A passionate promoter of the sciences, Dom Pedro had asked to accompany the judges on their rounds that morning, perfectly happy to be in the tropical-like heat that reminded him of home. When he saw Bell standing in the crowd of some fifty judges and a handful of hovering inventors, he immediately recognized him as the talented teacher of the deaf whom he had met in Boston.”
― Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“Far from its outward appearance, the rain forest was not a garden of easy abundance, but precisely the opposite. Its quiet, shaded halls of leafy opulence were not a sanctuary but, rather, the greatest natural battlefield anywhere on the planet, hosting an unremitting and remorseless fight for survival that occupied every single one of its inhabitants, every minute of every day. Though”
― Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

“Of course I deprecate war,” he wrote, “but if it is brought to my door the bringer will find me at home.”
― Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President