John Matteson > Quotes

“This book began with the assertion that Margaret Fuller's life was her most remarkable creation. It is just possible, however, that her most wonderful creations may still lie in the future. Fuller's most precious gift to us may reside in the ideas and the works, still yet to be imagined, of women and men who follow her example. We may decide that, despite all that Margaret Fuller endured and suffered in order to become exceptional, her life, or rather her lives, well deserve imitating.”
― John Matteson, The Lives of Margaret Fuller

“Emerson decried the life of the average person, so intent on satisfying the monotonous wants of an unexceptional life that the omnipresent miracles of the universe are invisible to him. Let the sun go up the sky, and the moon shine, and innumerable stars move before him in orbits so vast that centuries will not fulfill them…. He does not care—he does not know—he is creeping in a little path of his own…following a few appetites…peering around for a little bread.”
― John Matteson, Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father

“If to question everything be unlawful and dangerous, we had better undeclare our independence at once; for what the Declaration means is the right to question everything, even the truth of its own fundamental proposition.”53 Few paths through life could have entitled anyone to ask more questions than the road that had led through Ball’s Bluff, Fredericksburg, and Spotsylvania, and America has seldom if ever produced a more eloquent poser of questions than Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.”
― John Matteson, A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation

“[A] faith which promotes a good life insures also a good death; . . . he who lives well always dies well. Yes; let the lightning’s vivid flash; let storm, or poison, the gleaming dagger, the noon-day pestilence— let any of them be the instrument by which the spirit is disrobed of its fleshly clothing; let death come in slowly wasting years, or in but one moment’s agony; in calm consciousness or in delirious dream, death is good and welcome, if man has passed existence and probation wisely; for a better life is hid with Christ, and the freed spirit does but go home to be with God.”
― John Matteson, A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation

“Unfortunately, though, even in our own time, the stigma that can attach to the cleverest person in the room sometimes intensifies if that person happens to be a woman. To imagine that Fuller could conduct herself as she did and never run afoul of gender prejudice is fanciful. To suppose that such biases were alone responsible for her troubles is equally so.”
― John Matteson, The Lives of Margaret Fuller

“Law obviously existed because of a desire to lessen the quantum of suffering in a society. And yet law could only be said to exist where its enforcers had the power and will to inflict harm. Law, then, was not the setting of good against evil; it merely authorized the use of some kinds of evil to combat others. Moreover, Austin’s theory located the law’s authority in the”
― John Matteson, A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation

“Later in life, Holmes wrote to his friend Harold Laski, “Every mitigation”
― John Matteson, A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation

“tried to mix science with theology. He believed in a heaven where perfect truth presided, and he stood convinced that young children, recently arrived from that transcendent realm, were the unheeded messengers of a sacred revelation. He deemed it the work of the teacher to preserve and call forth this natural divinity of the child. If the world’s teachers could find”
― John Matteson, A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation

“once, Lincoln was confronting one of the deepest crises of his presidency. For months it had been clear to many, from George Whitman and Henry Abbott to the president’s cabinet, that the Emancipation Proclamation would be only a sad joke if Lincoln had no power to force the Southern states to comply. His latest attempt to impose his will upon the South had ended in the slaughter on Marye’s Heights. His promise of freedom to the enslaved millions within the Confederacy now looked embarrassingly empty. Less than three weeks before he was scheduled to sign the measure, it seemed likely that the president”
― John Matteson, A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation