Quotes from Anthony Esolen

employers have resorted to requiring a college degree. They do this not for anything the employee may have learned in college but to ensure that he will be able to read and count, and will show up on time. It's a mechanism, that's all. It helps keep the government overseer off their backs, lest they exert a human judgment not approved by their betters. So

Our motto instead is, "Work—or do anything at all, so long as you do not pray, or even come to an awareness of your frailty." Turn up the noise.

To put the matter bluntly, no sense at all can be made of the virtue of purity if sodomy is countenanced or even celebrated. That is because the virtue is founded in reality, and the vice depends upon denying the reality.

For the first time in human history, most people are doing things that could never interest a child enough to want to tag along. That says less about the child than about us.

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.

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

These days we have no true childhood, only a diseased precocity, introducing children to things that any decent man of Whittier's day, or of Armstrong's, would have considered unutterably vile. Therefore we have no true adulthood either, only a prolonged infantility, a curdled adolescence followed by old age and death.

Tolerance is that important but subordinate virtue by which, instructed in our own weakness, we bear with what is bad without pretending that it is good. We bear with it provisionally, even if sometimes there is nothing we can do about it or ever will be able to do about it. It

Virtue liberates; vice enslaves. A passion for genuine beauty liberates;

It is precisely because we believe in democracy as a talisman, a heal-all, that we are prone to the disintegration of language that characterizes Life Under Compulsion. It

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.

The music of the poem lends meaning to the words, and the meaning of the words lends music to the poem.

Where there is faith, there is liberty. The heavens are open, and man's life has an aim, transcending his corporeal makeup, the particularities of his culture, and the monetary exchanges he must make along the road. Where there is no faith, human choices, in all their mad variety, reel back into the dark woods, or into the inextricable error of the labyrinth. But the labyrinth is intolerable. We must be going somewhere.

It is a mark of a narcissistic age that some Christians have come to interpret these words as suggesting that we make Jesus present by means of our community, when exactly the reverse is the case. The only reason why Christians gather is that Jesus has already united us. We gather not in our names but in His name. It is He who has called us out of the darkness of egoism into His wonderful light.

The only reason why mankind has celebrated marriages is that they renew the race; they bring forth new life, within the bounds of a holy vow.

The very assumption behind the campaign for same-sex pseudogamy is that men are not for women and women are not for men, and that our sexual powers are for ourselves alone, to do with as we please without regard to biological nature, to children, and to the common good. It is radically individualistic.

The love of the married man and woman is not a private romance, but a recapitulation of the love that brought them into being in the first place, and that love is what we all duly celebrate.

How decisive for the Christian educator, or for any educator of good will, is the revelation that man is made in the image and likeness of the three-Personed God? That is like asking what difference it will make to us if we keep in mind that a human being is made not for the processing of data, but for wisdom; not for the utilitarian satisfaction of appetite, but for love; not for the domination of nature, but for participation in it; not for the autonomy of an isolated self, but for communion.

Art reveals to us the mysteries of our existence, or perhaps reveals to us for the first time that there are mysteries at all.

In other words, man's imagination, when it is not corrupt, yearns for the holy—to behold its beauty from a distance, to be possessed by it. All the greatest art of the past, pagan and Christian, testifies to this desire. It

And, at the same time, we began to build schools that are all inside and no outside, all stone and no garden, all power and no humility, all hulking system and no small child, all gears and no flowers, all compulsion and no promise.

Say that he was right about how bad it was in the Soviet Union, but he just didn't understand the nice materialism of the West. Say that the Soviet Union was bad because the people were deprived of meaningless creature comforts, and that the West is good because the people are flooded with them.

To be free is not to live in no place and at no time but to live in one place as in the shadow of all places, and to live in one time as in the morning twilight of eternity.

There is no biological reason for sodomy. The body does not need it; society does not need it; in this sense it is not a sin involving the intemperate use of something good or morally neutral, nor is it a sin involving the misuse of such things. It is an act which by its nature frustrates the function of the organs of the body it employs.