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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“How melancholy a thing is success,” he would later write. “Whilst failure inspires a man, attainment reads the sad prosy lesson that all our glories ‘are shadows, not substantial things.’ ”
― Candice Millard, River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile

“One of Roosevelt's most entrenched beliefs, as a cowboy, a hunter, a soldier, and an explorer, was that the health of one man should never endanger the lives of the rest of the men in his expedition. Roosevelt had unflinchingly cast off even good friends like Father Zahm when it became clear that they could no longer pull their own weight or were simply not healthy enough to endure the physical demands of the journey. "No man has any business to go on such a trip as ours unless he will refuse to jeopardize the welfare of his associates by any delay caused by a weakness or ailment of his," he wrote. "It is his duty to go forward, if necessary on all fours, until he drops."...
Roosevelt had even held himself to these unyielding standards after Schrank, the would-be assassin, shot him in Milwaukee. Few men would have even considered giving a speech with a bullet in their chest. Roosevelt had insisted on it. This was an approach to life, and death, that he had developed many years earlier, when living with cowboys and soldiers. "Both the men of my regiment and the friends I had made in the old days in the West were themselves a little puzzled at the interest shown in my making my speech after being shot," he wrote. "This was what they expected, what they accepted as the right thing for a man to do under the circumstances, a thing the nonperformance of which would have been discreditable rather than the performance being creditable.”
― Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

“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

“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

“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

“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

“For freed slaves, an impoverished and, until recently, almost entirely powerless segment of the population, Garfield represented freedom and progress, but also, and perhaps more importantly, dignity. As president, he demanded for black men nothing less than what they wanted most desperately for themselves—complete and unconditional equality, born not of regret but respect. “You were not made free merely to be allowed to vote, but in order to enjoy an equality of opportunity in the race of life,” Garfield had told a delegation of 250 black men just before he was elected president. “Permit no man to praise you because you are black, nor wrong you because you are black. Let it be known that you are ready and willing to work out your own material salvation by your own energy, your own worth, your own labor.”
― Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“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

“So determined was Roosevelt that his children grow up to be strong, fearless adults that he had said that he would “rather one of them should die than have them grow up weaklings.” To ensure that none of them would ever be the kind of weakling he himself had been before he had resolved to “make” his body, Roosevelt had put his children through frequent and, for some of them, terrifying tests of physical endurance and courage. Most of these tests took place during what came to be known in the Roosevelt household as scrambles, long point-to-point walks led by Roosevelt himself. The only rule during these walks was that the participants could go through, over, or under an obstacle, but never around it. Roosevelt and his children, as well as a revolving crowd of cousins and friends, would not turn aside “for anything,” Ted Jr. would later write. “If a haystack was in the way we either climbed over it or burrowed through it. If we came to a pond we swam across.”

Roosevelt used these scrambles, as well as other, separate excursions, to attack his children’s wilderness fears, which he referred to as buck fever—“a state of intense nervous excitement which may be entirely divorced from timidity.” Even the most courageous man, he believed, when confronted by real danger in the wilderness—whether it be an angry lion or a roaring river—could suffer from buck fever. “What such a man needs is not courage but nerve control, cool-headedness,” he explained. “This he can get only by actual practice.”
― Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

“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

“Most of the men were veteran outdoorsmen, and many of them considered themselves masters of nature. They were stealthy hunters, crack shots, and experienced survivalists, and, given the right tools, they believed that they would never find themselves in a situation in the wild that they could not control. But as they struggled to make their way along the shores of the River of Doubt, any basis for such confidence was quickly slipping away.”
― Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey