Quotes from 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, quote from 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, quote from Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

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

“This is the way in which we transact the public business of the Nation,” a New York newspaper had recently complained. “No man has the slightest chance of securing the smallest place because of his fitness for it.… If your streets are so unclean to-day as to threaten a pestilence, it is because those in charge were appointed through political influence, with no regard to their capacity to work.”
― Candice Millard, quote from 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, quote from Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“I must say that I thought there was some derangement of his mental organization.”
― Candice Millard, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“Eager as they were to leave, the judges could not go anywhere without Dom Pedro, who was not only the leader of a large country but, with his irrepressible energy and enthusiasm, had become the darling of the centennial fair.”
― Candice Millard, quote from Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“a religious book he had written several years ago called The Truth: A Companion to the Bible. The publicity it would bring the book, he believed, was one of the principal reasons God wanted him to assassinate the president. “Two points will be accomplished,” he wrote. “It will save the Republic, and create a demand for my book,”
― Candice Millard, quote from Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“The only public position Arthur had held before becoming vice president of the United States was as collector of the New York Customs House, a job that Conkling had secured for him and which paid more than $50,000 a year—as much as the president’s salary, and five times as much as the vice president’s. Even then, he had been forced out of office amid widespread allegations of corruption.”
― Candice Millard, quote from 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, quote from Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“To a young man who has in himself the magnificent possibilities of life, it is not fitting that he should be permanently commanded. He should be a commander. JAMES A. GARFIELD”
― Candice Millard, quote from Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“This world,” he had learned long before, “does not seem to be the place to carry out one’s wishes.”
― Candice Millard, quote from 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.” As”
― Candice Millard, quote from Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“I so much despise a man who blows his own horn, that I go to the other extreme.”
― Candice Millard, quote from Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“For the first time in their memory, certainly since the earliest beginnings of the Civil War, Americans facing the shared tragedy of Garfield’s ordeal felt a deep and surprising connection to one another. Divided by vast stretches of dangerous wilderness and stark differences in race, religion, and culture, there had been little beyond severely strained notions of common citizenship to unite them. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln sixteen years earlier had only deepened that divide. But the attempt on Garfield’s life aroused feelings of patriotism that many Americans had long since forgotten, or never knew they had.”
― Candice Millard, quote from 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, quote from Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“As Bliss declared victory, Bell struggled with a nagging sense of unease.”
― Candice Millard, quote from Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

About the author

Popular quotes

“MAYBE IT WOULD be a good idea to rearrange the flat a bit,’ said Mum. ‘I’ve been thinking. You and Kendall might like your own den, more of a play space. So how about us turning the bedroom into your room. It’s purple too, your favourite colour.’ ‘Lilac isn’t purple.’ ‘It’s light purple, Miss Picky. Anyway, I was thinking of getting a little portable telly for you two. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Then the living room could be more – well, my room.’ ‘And you want to put a socking great bed in it for you and Jake,’ I said coldly. ‘No I don’t! Well. I was thinking about one of them sofa beds. Then if Jake should want to stay over . . .’ ‘Why can’t he stay in his own place?’ ‘He hasn’t exactly got his own place,’ said Mum. ‘He’s staying with a friend at the moment.’ ‘Why can’t he get his own place, then?’ I said. ‘Because he hasn’t got any money. He’s a student.’ ‘They give them rooms in the university, don’t they?’ ‘Only the first year. For God’s sake, Lola Rose, give it a rest. He’s coming to live with us and that’s that. I don’t see why you’ve got such a problem with it. We’re in love, can’t you see?’ ‘He doesn’t love you. He’s just shacking up with us because he hasn’t got anywhere else. And you spend a fortune on him. Our fortune.’ Mum slapped me straight across the face. Kendall was watching. He cried. I didn’t cry. I stared Mum out. ‘You only slapped me because you know it’s true.’ ‘I slapped you because you’re a spoilt little cow,’ Mum snapped. ‘What’s the matter with you, Lola Rose? You can’t be jealous, can you?”
― Jacqueline Wilson, quote from Lola Rose

“Wen grinned and I felt a warm glow and an odd dizzy sensation. And then I remembered something my dad once wrote me about falling in love. He said the phrase was apt because falling is exactly what it can feel like, as if you've finally allowed yourself to let go of some safety bar you didn't even know you were clinging to, and suddenly you find yourself tumbling towards the exciting unknown.”
― Mark Peter Hughes, quote from Lemonade Mouth

“The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, omnipresent and unnoticed, which protect the growth of the young mind, and guide man's interpretation of his life and struggles.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from The Birth of Tragedy

“Thus, the philosopher dislikes marriage as well as what might persuade him into it??marriage is a barrier and a disaster along his route to the optimal. What great philosopher up to now has been married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibtniz, Kant, Schopenhauer?? None of these got married. What`s more, we cannot even imagine them married. A married philosopher belongs in a comedy, that`s my principle. And Socrates, the exception, the malicious Socrates, it appears, got married ironically to demonstrate this very principle.

Every philosopher would speak as once Buddha spoke when someone told him of the birth his son, "Rahula has been born to me. A shackle has been forged for me." (Rahula here means "a little demon"). To every "free spirit" there must come a reflective hour, provided that previously he has had a one without thought, of the sort that came then to Buddha - "Life in a house," he thought to himself, "is narrow and confined, a polluted place. Freedom consists of abandoning houses;" "because he thought this way, he left the house.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from On the Genealogy of Morals

“If other furniture items could see his actions that day, and if that same furniture then had dreams… well they’d have been horrific nightmares of wooden destruction at the hands of a metal clad monster, i.e. Dorian Thornbear.”
― Michael G. Manning, quote from The God-Stone War

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.