A Worse Place Than Hell Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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