Anthony M. Esolen Quotes

#1. For those of you who may be homeschooled: high school is that four-year asylum where they put teenagers because we have no idea what else to do with them.

Anthony M. Esolen

#2. What can chastity or purity even mean, once you have smiled at sodomy?

Anthony M. Esolen

#3. On three great bonds of love do all cultures depend: the love between man and woman in marriage; the love between a mother and her child; and the camaraderie among men, a bond that used to be strong enough to move mountains. The first two have suffered greatly; the third has almost ceased to exist.

Anthony M. Esolen

#4. The computer on the desk of the student in school knows no history. It is not like a book, worn at the edges by human hands. No little child has written a note in it, long ago. It will not be passed down to the children of the children who use it. Its "meaning" is that there is no enduring meaning.

Anthony M. Esolen

#5. The first good news for all of us, the first joyful story of our lives, is that there is a story at all, and an Author who has loved us into being.

Anthony M. Esolen

#6. They do not seek "safety." They seek to destroy.

Anthony M. Esolen

#7. after all these programs and scholarships, after all the work done by organized athletics at all levels, the number of boys actually playing baseball or football is far lower than before: no one is outdoors playing.

Anthony M. Esolen

#8. the phrase "stay-at-home mom" is patronizing and faintly derogatory, like "stick-in-the-mud mom" or "sit-in-the-corner mom." Do we talk about a "chained-to-the-desk mom" or a "stuck-in-traffic mom" or a "languishing-in-meetings mom"?

Anthony M. Esolen

#9. Here is a quick and generally reliable rule to follow. If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment. People

Anthony M. Esolen

#10. Our freedom is a personal freedom only when, in it and through it, our persons may flourish, but that is so only in love.

Anthony M. Esolen

#11. After years of watching the comic face of nihilism, your children will come to respect nothing, love nothing, believe in nothing, and long for nothing.

Anthony M. Esolen

#12. We see then that the principle of sexual autonomy is fundamentally antisocial. It not only retreats from social responsibility; it breeds social irresponsibility.

Anthony M. Esolen

#13. To give yourself over to an evil is, in some measure, to pretend that what you know is wrong is right, and then, to justify yourself, you must give yourself over to it all the more.

Anthony M. Esolen