Anthony M. Esolen Quotes

It wasn't the lower classes that preached the religion of sexual liberation. That came from the upper classes, with their comfortable cushions against the resulting disorder. What did it matter to them that they were polluting the waters? Their houses were upstream. The biological absurdism of same-sex pseudogamy (mock-marriage) is just the latest effort of the same irresponsible destroyers. Let those who are in favor of the world that the sexual revolution has produced defend it on its "merits," and not decree all discussion out of bounds from the beginning. We are not talking about privacy here, but about the air we all must breathe and the water we all must drink.

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

Mass madness, if it's going to last more than a week or two, requires mass media or mass government or the synergistic efforts of both. It isn't just that the pretense that a man can marry a man will put religious believers at a disadvantage. It's that it must set that ordinary tribeswoman in its sights, regardless of her religion. It's not just her faith she must renounce. She must renounce her common sense. She must not be allowed even to think that the pretense is insane. She must be re-educated to believe that two fingers are three fingers, or that the sun rises in the west, or that the child in her womb is really a rock, or that excrement is nutritious, or anything else that no sensible person would ever come to discover on her own.

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.

Truly tolerant people are hard to offend.

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.

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.

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

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.

In East Bangor, Pennsylvania (population 800), there's a little diner named for the trolley that used to take people to the once-bustling steel town of Bethlehem. The proprietors have adorned the walls with photographs of other local things that are no more. There's one of the East Bangor band, a group of about twenty men and boys, in uniform, in front of a bandstand draped with bunting. There's also one of the Kaysers, a local baseball club, on the day of an exhibition ballgame against the Philadelphia Athletics. These were Connie Mack's A's, which team in those early 1930s featured Hall of Famers Jimmie Foxx, Mickey Cochrane, and Lefty Grove. How did a village of under a thousand people manage to have its own band? How did a cluster of slate-belt villages field a regular baseball club, apparently good enough to stay on the same field for nine innings with the Philadelphia Athletics? What

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

Every encounter with human truth - Jane Austen deftly showing how little we know our own motives; Dickens revealing the meaning of "economy" in the cheerful and charitable housekeeping of Esther Summerson, his finest heroine; or Shakespeare offering us the foolish Lear, mad and childish and yet "every inch a king" - can expand the soul; it helps to set us free from the common delusions of our time, the lies we believe and the lies we tell. But

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.

We can't say at once, "The sex of a child's 'parents' doesn't matter," and then say that the sex of the person with whom the adult shares a bed matters so much that he or she can't possibly conform his or her ways to nature. The boy doesn't need a father, because sex doesn't matter; but his mother needs a "wife" and can't possibly be expected to take a man, because in this case sex matters more than everything else in the world.

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.

We would – or at least we should – take upon ourselves the ultimate task of our poet: to seek the face of God.