Quotes from John Matteson

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.

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.

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

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

Later in life, Holmes wrote to his friend Harold Laski, "Every mitigation

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.