Top 35 Candice Millard Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

3. “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

4. “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

5. “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

6. “The first time you meet Winston you see all his faults,” Pamela would explain years later to Edward Marsh, Churchill’s private secretary, “and the rest of your life you spend in discovering his virtues.”

— Candice Millard

7. “When dredging up an old scandal proved ineffective, zealous Democrats invented a new one.”

— Candice Millard

8. “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

9. “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

10. “More often than not, real life is so rich, complex and unpredictable that it would seem completely implausible in the pages of a novel.”

— Candice Millard

11. “Always more audacity.”

— Candice Millard

12. “When I began work on my first book, The River of Doubt, which tells the story of Theodore Roosevelts 1914 descent of an unmapped river in the Amazon rainforest, I thought of it as a tale of adventure, exploration and extraordinary courage.”

— Candice Millard

13. “With the Lincoln assassination, the South didnt feel it could mourn along with the North. But Garfield was beloved by all the American people. He was trusted and respected by North and South, by freed slaves and former slave owners. Also by pioneers, which his parents had been, and by immigrants.”

— Candice Millard

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “Long before it was over, the war would also change the empire in another, equally indelible way: It would bring to the attention of a rapt British public a young man named Winston Churchill.”

— Candice Millard

21. “I have always been interested in the idea of self-reinvention.”

— Candice Millard

22. “Honor in the Dust is less about the freedom of the Philippines than the soul of the United States.”

— Candice Millard

23. “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

24. “Jan Smuts, the brilliant young Transvaal state attorney, wrote of Botha that he had a natural sympathy that made it possible for him to “get extremely close to others and to read their minds and divine their characters with marvellous accuracy. It gave him an intuitive power of understanding and appreciating men which was very rare.” Botha.”

— Candice Millard

25. “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

26. “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

27. “Chance is unceasingly at work in our lives,” Churchill would write years later, thinking back on Grenfell and the fate that might have been his, “but we cannot always see its workings sharply and clearly defined.”

— Candice Millard

28. “War had turned out to be far more.”

— Candice Millard

29. “If it was not a good idea, it was at least an interesting one.”

— Candice Millard

30. “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

31. “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

32. “The more I study religion,” he wrote, “the more I am convinced that man never worshiped anyone but himself.”

— Candice Millard

33. “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

34. “In its intense and remorseless competition for every available nutrient, the Amazon offered little just for the taking.”

— Candice Millard

35. “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

36. “Of course I deprecate war,” he wrote, “but if it is brought to my door the bringer will find me at home.”

— Candice Millard