Quotes from Anthony Esolen

We do not know what or how to teach children, because we do not know what a child is, and we do not know what a child is, because we do not know what man is -- and Him from whom and for whom man is.

To meet with things newborn: for the Christian, that is the hope that burns brightly at Christmas, and Pentecost, and Easter.

Those who separate themselves from love, hardening their hearts as they grasp for power or wealth or fame, must separate themselves from the ground of their being. To fail to love is to destroy oneself.

The lie rushes in to fill up the void left by truth in retreat. When people lose their faith in God, for example they do not then believe in nothing.... They commence believing in anything.

Planned Parenthood (Planned Predators would perhaps be more apt) have long declared, with crocodilian tears, that every child should be a wanted child, predicating the child's value upon the lusts of the parents, rather than valuing the parents' actions according to the being and the beauty of a child.

The lie rushes in to fill up the void left by the truth in retreat. When people lose their faith in God, for example, they do not believe in nothing. It is as Chesterton said, they will believe in anything, usually the nearest and biggest thing, the gross power of the state to solve their problems.

We don't actually want our young people to encounter the mysteries of love anyway; best to keep them preoccupied with the tedium of lust instead. The

Justice is only what a "culture," meaning a shifting majority of people, say it is, with a dollop of respect for "human rights" spread on top, without intellectual foundation, and without any connection with virtue and duty.

Books are bulky and inconvenient—like rocks, and trees, and rivers, and life. It occurs to me that everything that can be said against the inconvenience of books can be said about the inconvenience of children. They too take up space, are of no immediate practical use, are of interest to only a few people, and present all kinds of problems. They too must be warehoused efficiently, and brought with as little resistance as possible into the Digital Age.

The early Christians saw the connections quite clearly, which is why they set themselves apart from the licentiousness. They did not frequent houses of prostitution, they did not divorce, they did not kill their babies, and they did not engage in sexual perversion.

If you are a law unto yourself, obeying the promptings of your pleasure within a state-sanctioned playground, you are no citizen but a subject, or a slave, both to your passions and to the dictates of a state which men no longer govern.

A man is not defined but un-defined by autonomy: he loses his skin.

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

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.

I am saying rather that men did not behave as men are wont to do, in part because of the essential change in political bodies, where everyone senses that protection at all costs, rather than the good and bloody battle, is the rule of the day. As soon as someone says, "You want 200,000 people to die," the chance for a discussion is over, because the rejoinder, "You are speaking like a coward and an ass," is no longer possible.