Esolen Anthony Quotes

Virtue liberates; vice enslaves. A passion for genuine beauty liberates; ~ Anthony Esolen

You democratize heroism. Everybody is a hero, and simply for doing (and often not well at that) the ordinary tasks of living as a half-decent person. Does your mother fix you breakfast? She is a hero. Does your father visit you every weekend without fail? A hero. Does your teacher mark your papers faithfully when you make a mistake? Unexampled heroism, that. If everyone is a hero, then no one is a hero; and genuine heroes will go unnoticed in all the mindless self-congratulation. ~ Anthony Esolen

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. ~ Anthony Esolen

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 ~ Anthony M. Esolen

The worst feature of the Common Core is its anti-humanistic, utilitarian approach to education. It mistakes what a child is and what a human being is for. That is why it has no use for poetry, and why it boils the study of literature down to the scrambling up of some marketable "skill" [ ... ] you don't read good books to learn about what literary artists do ... you learn about literary art so that you can read more good books and learn more from them. It is as if Thomas Gradgrind had gotten hold of the humanities and turned them into factory robotics. ~ Anthony Esolen

Many of the greatest books are like a forest. The best way to get to know them is to wander right into the middle and get lost. ~ Anthony Esolen

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

Truly tolerant people are hard to offend. ~ Anthony M. Esolen

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 ~ Anthony M. Esolen

Words fail us. They are like keys: they open, but they also shut. When we were small and could hardly raise ourselves from the floor, we curled our fingers around the fingers of mother and father, and we looked into their faces as they looked into ours. Where is the word for that? ~ Anthony Esolen

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. ~ Anthony M. Esolen

It's rather the possibility of friendship, unencumbered by feelings of attraction or shyness; the possibility of working on the same wavelength, as it were, with someone who understands you because he's a boy as you are, or a girl as you are. Committee work stifles the imagination, because people have to work down to the common denominator of what would be minimally acceptable to everyone. But friendship exalts the imagination. Indeed it is one of the things that the ancients said friendship was for. Plato suggests in Symposium that one of the highest forms of friendship is one whose love issues forth in beautiful and virtuous deeds, for thus the partnership between [the friends] will be far closer and the bond of affection far stronger than between ordinary parents, because the children that they share surpass human children by being immortal as well as more beautiful. ~ Anthony Esolen

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 ~ Anthony Esolen

What can chastity or purity even mean, once you have smiled at sodomy? ~ Anthony M. Esolen

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 ~ Anthony Esolen

In a pit of mud, everyone looks like everyone else. It is the clean who are distinct. In a mob, everyone behaves like everyone else. It is the friend who is distinct. ~ Anthony Esolen

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

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. ~ Anthony Esolen

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. ~ Anthony Esolen

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. ~ Anthony Esolen

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. ~ Anthony M. Esolen

But if the line is drawn farther off, or not drawn at all, then the homosexual must go ever further for the same thrill of transgression. He must invent new methods, new combinations. Not content with merely inserting his organ of generation in the place of evacuation and uncleanness, he has to insert his fist there too - and we are subjected to the absurdity of school officials nodding in their superior wisdom as Mr. Savage explains to teenagers that you really can shape your fist so that it won't cause intense pain or tear the rectum or do a host of other things that he won't tell them about, because they involve diseases like hepatitis, and it's best to hide those things from teenagers who are apt to be squeamish about people sneezing on their lunch, let alone invading their intestines. ~ Anthony Esolen

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. ~ Anthony Esolen

Children are often called our greatest resource, as if they were deposits of tin. But a child is not (just as an adult is not) a lever in an economic machine, a vehicle for commerce, a revenue source for the all-powerful state. He is a human being, made in the image and likeness of God - made, that is, for goodness and truth and beauty. ~ Anthony Esolen

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

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. ~ Anthony Esolen

Fairy tales and folk tales are for children and childlike people, not because they are little and inconsequential, but because they are as enormous as life itself. ~ Anthony Esolen

We sense that the human body is a precious thing, worthy of our reverence. It is not a tool, not an object of consumption like a steak or a keg of beer, not an animate provider of pleasure. It is the outward expression of a profound mystery, that of another human being. ~ Anthony Esolen

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. ~ Anthony Esolen

If we loved children, we would have a few. If we had them, we would want them as children, and would love the wonder with which they behold the world, and would hope some of it might open our eyes a little. We would love their games, and would want to play them once in a while, stirring in ourselves those memories of play that no one regrets, and that are almost the only things an old man can look back on with complete satisfaction. We would want children tagging along after us, or if not, then only because we would understand that they had better things to do. ~ Anthony Esolen

Independence. Freedom. Liberty. These have become bywords of our time. And yet we hardly understand the terms at all anymore ... The assumption is now nearly automatic that freedom is without substance. It is an extrinsic condition, and a negative at that. It means that there are no strings upon the autonomous self. It is ... freedom as license, as a permission slip to do as you please. It is freedom that worships the abstraction of choice: choice is the only thing that matters; whether it is one choice or another matters not at all. ~ Anthony Esolen

Nearly all the school subjects lay great stress on information. But literature makes its appeal to the heart as well as the intellect. Geography ~ Anthony Esolen

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

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

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. ~ Anthony Esolen

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

Man is not only that creature that forges tools, that reasons, and that walks upright. Man is the creature that looks up. Man praises. ~ Anthony Esolen

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 ~ Anthony Esolen

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

If you had to choose between art and the slogan, or between history and the slogan, you might as well choose the slogan and have done with pretending even to care about art and history. The reduction of all things to politics must reduce them, in their own right, to irrelevance. ~ Anthony Esolen

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. ~ Anthony Esolen

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

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. ~ Anthony Esolen

Millions of women rose up, said G. K. Chesterton, to declare that they would no longer be dictated to, and promptly became stenographers. ~ Anthony Esolen

Virtue humanizes and spiritualizes what is part animal in us. Vice brutalizes what is human and spiritual in us. ~ Anthony Esolen

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. ~ Anthony M. Esolen

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. ~ Anthony M. Esolen

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. ~ Anthony Esolen

If I had died it would have been even better for you political bratchnies, would it not, pretending and treacherous droogs as you are.' But all that came out was er er er. ~ Anthony Burgess

Flowers grow on her tiny wrought-iron balcony, and in summer she can estimate what time of day it is by feeling how wide the petals of the evening primroses have opened. ~ Anthony Doerr

purposefully in twos and threes into the streets: ~ Anthony Doerr

Our goal as parents should be to endeavor to pass down our faith to the next generation in such a way that they will be able to pass down their faith to the following generation in our absence. ~ Michelle Anthony

Long experience has told me that to be criticized is not always to be wrong. ~ Anthony Eden

Disasters are funny to me. As a comedian you learn from failure, so I'm always trying to put myself in a situation that does not seem ideal for my comedy and see how it works. ~ Anthony Jeselnik

We are a complex and complicated, multidimensional being. Whoever crosses your path each day is another part of yourself you need to see or meet that day. ~ Russell Anthony Gibbs

When you work with Sir Anthony there are days when he will do a lot of takes if he's really enjoying a scene. ~ Claire Forlani

Separated from the cave by an inlet, the waves pounding ~ Anthony Horowitz

Your imagination can take you on a journey just as any form of transport can. ~ Anthony T. Hincks

Thursday is full of timeless thoughts, and marshmallow dreams. ~ Anthony T. Hincks

Desire is transformed into drive when a dream creates a passion for action ~ Robert Anthony

Normally I work out a general summary of what I mean to do, then start writing, and the details can be different from my anticipation. So there is considerable flow, but always within channels. ~ Piers Anthony

The 4th of July

Independence Day...
The day that we threw of our shackles...
The day that we became a nation...
A nation that soon became the greatest on Earth...
A nation that became a world leader...
A nation that became a world innovator..
A nation where dreams were fostered and became reality...
A nation of great minds...
A nation where inventors could make the impossible become the possible...
A nation that became a nation...
A nation that guaranteed free speech for all...
A nation that put people first...
A nation that welcomed those from other countries so that we could build our nation even further...
A nation that remembers past events because no matter how we try and hide the past, that is what has helped to make our nation what it is today...
So be proud of what we have achieved and what we can do together to make our future better for everyone. ~ Anthony T. Hincks

I love food shows: Anthony Bourdain, Iron Chef, Chopped, you name it. ~ Donnie Wahlberg

Life has taught me that sometimes you have to reevaluate your lines in the sand. ~ La La Anthony

There is no greater sign of innate misery than a love of teasing. ~ Anthony Powell

CHAPTER XVI MR. GOTOBED'S PHILANTHROPY ~ Anthony Trollope

Grind until you get it no matter what the haters say and never look back, keep striving cause its your life. ~ Jonathan Anthony Burkett

When I talk to children, I show them a typical drawing I made when I was six and point out to them that when I was their age, I didn't draw any better than any of them. ~ Anthony Browne

Men and not measures are, no doubt, the very life of politics. But then it is not the fashion to say so in public places. ~ Anthony Trollope

Most of my movies are indies. The best scripts I can find are independent films. But I love big-budget movies, I love craft services! ~ Anthony Mackie

All those predictions about how much economic growth will be created by this, all of those new jobs, would be created by the things we wanted - the extension of unemployment insurance and middle class tax cuts. An estate tax for millionaires adds exactly zero jobs. A tax cut for billionaires - virtually none. ~ Anthony Weiner

If my children were as unhappy as I was at school, I'd send them somewhere else, but it never occurred to my parents. ~ Anthony Horowitz

When the time draws close the buzzing of the bees will be continuous. ~ Anthony T. Hincks

If a man brags about his sex life he's a stud, but if a woman brags about her sex life she's a slut. ~ Anthony Liccione

Be a witness, as I excersize my exorcism ~ Anthony Ian Berkeley

God save the King!"
Old Sapt's mouth wrinkled into a smile.
"God save 'em both!" he whispered. ~ Anthony Hope

Passengers want options, and when they have options, like passenger rail, they choose them. ~ Anthony Foxx

Enjoy making decisions. You must know that in any moment a decision you make can change the course of your life forever: the very next person you stand behind in line or sit next to on an airplane, the very next phone call you make or receive, the very next movie you see or book you read or page you turn could be the one single thing that causes the floodgates to open, and all of the things that you've been waiting for to fall into place. If you really want your life to be passionate, you need to live with this attitude of expectancy. ~ Anthony Robbins

All history is present history in the sense that the concerns of the present are bound somehow to affect the way history is studied and written. All history is also personal, since it is impossible to avoid the influence of one's own opinions and prejudices on the selection and emphasis of one's historical material. ~ Paul Anthony Cartledge

something so single-minded. Never has he felt such a hunger to belong. In the rows of dormitories are cadets who talk of alpine skiing, of duels, of jazz clubs and governesses and boar hunting; boys who employ curse words with virtuosic skill and boys who talk about cigarettes named for cinema stars; boys who speak of "telephoning the colonel" and boys who have baronesses for mothers. ~ Anthony Doerr

He says, "I saved her only to hear her die. ~ Anthony Doerr

My father rebelled ferociously against his conservative upbringing where his father physically abused him. ~ Anthony Kiedis

We all ran barefooted on the dusty roads in our past, but now the Emperor wears shoes, and it is our responsibility to ensure that the barefooted child and the doting mother are afforded a holistic environment to realise their dreams and ambitions. ~ Anthony Carmona

To be recognized by a brand like Reebok and to know that the company is looking at mixed martial arts shows the growth of the sport. For me, it's an amazing opportunity. I get to be the face of my own shoe, and it's surreal. ~ Anthony Pettis

No one ever achieved a goal by being interested in its achievement. One must be committed. ~ Anthony Robbins