The River of Doubt 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“he talked in broad terms about character, moral strength, compassion, and responsibility. “We do not set greed against greed or hatred against hatred,” he thundered. “Our creed is one that bids us to be just to all, to feel sympathy for all, and to strive for an understanding of the needs of all. Our purpose is to smite down wrong.”
― Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

“I love peace, but it is because I love justice and not because I am afraid of war,”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“For Roosevelt, who was not used to losing, even his victory over Taft was cold comfort. He had long ago lost his respect for the three-hundred-pound president, dismissing him as “a flubdub with a streak of the second-rate and”
― Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

“If I had very much time to think. I believe I should go crazy.

Diary of Theodore Roosevelt”
― Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

“If we swam the Potomac, we usually took off our clothes. I remember on one such occasion when the French Ambassador, [Jules] Jusserand . . . was along, and, just as we were about to get in to swim, somebody said, ‘Mr. Ambassador, Mr. Ambassador, you haven’t taken off your gloves,’ to which he promptly responded, ‘I think I will leave them on; we might meet ladies!”
― Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

“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

“In its intense and remorseless competition for every available nutrient, the Amazon offered little just for the taking.”
― Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

“I love peace, but it is because I love justice and not because I am afraid of war,” Roosevelt told the spellbound crowd. “I took the action I did in Panama because to have acted otherwise would have been both weak and wicked. I would have taken that action no matter what power had stood in the way. What I did was in the interest of all the world, and was particularly in the interests of Chile and of certain other South American countries. I was in accordance with the highest and strictest dictates of justice. If it were a matter to do over again, I would act precisely and exactly as I in very fact did act.” As these words rang through the hall, the audience leapt to its feet, cheering and applauding the Yankee imperialist.”
― Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

“We do not set greed against greed or hatred against hatred,” he thundered. “Our creed is one that bids us to be just to all, to feel sympathy for all, and to strive for an understanding of the needs of all. Our purpose is to smite down wrong.”
― Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

“Within such an intricate world of resourcefulness, skill, and ruthless self-interest, refined over hundreds of millions of years, Roosevelt and his men were, for all their own experience and knowledge, vulnerable outsiders. 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. Compared with the creatures of the Amazon, including the Indians whose territory they were invading, they were all—from the lowliest camarada to the former president of the United States—clumsy, conspicuous prey.”
― Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

“Desperate to conquer his despair”
― Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

“So important and ubiquitous are insects in the ecology of the Amazon that, notwithstanding their generally small size, ants alone make up more than 10 percent of the biomass of all the animals in the rain forest.”
― Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

“If he could not rule he would ruin.”
― Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

“their mouths and eyes, piums hovered over them in thick clouds, and ants and termites regularly raided their camp and devoured their few belongings. Worse even than the insects that fed on their hammocks and undershirts were those that wanted to feed on the men themselves. The barefoot camaradas were vulnerable to intestinal worms, which usually enter the body through the soles of the feet, and all of the men had to watch out for grubs and botflies. As Rondon had learned during earlier expeditions, flies, with their long, sharp ovipositors, or egg-laying organs, could easily deposit grubs into human flesh, even through clothing. Botflies were, if possible, even more loathsome than grubs. As big as a bumblebee, a botfly can snatch a mosquito out of the air as it is flying by and paste its eggs onto the mosquito’s abdomen. The mosquito then rubs the botfly’s eggs onto a human being as it extracts his blood. As soon as the eggs hatch on the warm, wet skin, the new maggots begin to burrow into their host. A botfly maggot can”
― Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

“Roosevelt was about to become an explorer in the truest, and most unforgiving, sense of the word.”
― Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

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― Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

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― Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

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― Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey