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

Candice Millard

Top 10 Best 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.”

“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”

“She (the First Lady, entering the room with her gravely wounded husband) would admit fear but not despair.”

“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”

“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.”

“during his first year at the Eclectic that, by his second year, the school had promoted him from janitor to assistant professor.”

“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.”

“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”

“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”

“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.”

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Book Keywords:

prejudice, sovereignty-of-god, popularity, humility, grace-of-god, fear, stoicism, composure, human-opinion, despair

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