Destiny of the Republic Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Light itself is a great corrective. A thousand wrongs and abuses that are
grown in darkness disappear like owls and bats before the light of day. JAMES A. GARFIELD”
― Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“Not only did many American doctors not believe in germs, they took pride in the particular brand of filth that defined their profession. They spoke fondly of the “good old surgical stink” that pervaded their hospitals and operating rooms, and they resisted making too many concessions even to basic hygiene.”
― Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“In the darkest days of the Civil War, he had wondered if the war itself was God’s punishment for the horrors of slavery. “For what else are we so fearfully scourged and defeated?” he had asked.”
― Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“What has survived of Garfield, however, is far more powerful than a portrait, a statue, or even the fragment of his spine that tells the tragic story of his assassination. The horror and senselessness of his death, and the wasted promise of his life, brought tremendous change to the country he loved - change that, had it come earlier, almost certainly would have spared his life.”
― Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

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

“Is freedom “the bare privilege of not being chained?” he asked. “If this is all, then freedom is a bitter mockery, a cruel delusion, and it may well be questioned whether slavery were not better. Let us not commit ourselves to the absurd and senseless dogma that the color of the skin shall be the basis of suffrage, the talisman of liberty.” Garfield”
― 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.”
― Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“Although Garfield was dangerously ill, the idea of taking him to a hospital was never considered. Hospitals were only for people who had nowhere else to go. “No sick or injured person who could possibly be nursed at home or in a medical man’s private residence,”
― 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

“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

“I have seen the sea lashed into fury and tossed into spray, and its grandeur moves the soul of the dullest man; but I remember that it is not the billows, but the calm level of the sea, from which all heights and depths are measured.”
― Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“It was when he spoke about the legacy of the Civil War, however, that Garfield was most passionate. With victory, he told the crowd standing before him, had come extraordinary opportunity. “The elevation of the negro race from slavery to the full rights of citizenship is the most important political change we have known since the adoption of the Constitution,” he said. “It has liberated the master as well as the slave from a relation which wronged and enfeebled both.”
― Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“Even the editor of the highly respected Medical Record found more to fear than to admire in Lister’s theory. “Judging the future by the past,” he wrote, “we are likely to be as much ridiculed in the next century for our blind belief in the power of unseen germs, as our forefathers were for their faith in the influence of spirits, of certain planets and the like, inducing certain maladies.”
― Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“Even had Garfield simply been left alone, he almost certainly would have survived. Lodged as it was in the fatty tissue below and behind his pancreas, the bullet itself was no continuing danger to the president. Nature did all she could to restore him to health, a surgeon would write just a few years later. She caused a capsule of thick, strong, fibrous tissue to be formed around the bullet, completely walling it off from the rest of the body, and rendering it entirely harmless.”
― Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“When dredging up an old scandal proved ineffective, zealous Democrats invented a new one.”
― Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“Although each of these disparate groups trusted Garfield, it was not until they were plunged into a common grief and fear that they began to trust one another. Suddenly, a contemporary of Garfield’s wrote, the nation was “united, as if by magic.” Even Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederacy and a man whom Garfield had voted to indict as a war criminal, admitted that the assassination attempt had made “the whole Nation kin.”
― Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President