Quotes from Candice Millard

'Honor in the Dust' is less about the freedom of the Philippines than the soul of the United States.

Late-19th-century America, with all its chaotic change and immense potential, seems to have been the perfect place to become not someone else, but someone new.

As someone who has long loved history and reads a lot of history, especially when you get a distance like 130 years, these people can seem almost mythical, and you need something tangible to make them real.

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

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

As I have encountered difficult moments in my own life, I have been privileged to learn from the great men I have come to know as a writer.

If uncovering the truth is the greatest challenge of nonfiction writing, it is also the greatest reward.

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

With the Lincoln assassination, the South didn't 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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

All Nature smiles, and here at last is a land where white men may rule and prosper." (Churchill on first seeing the southern coast of Africa)

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.

War had turned out to be far more

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.

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

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

She is certain[ly] very clever, in a doubtful sense of the word.

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

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.

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