Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child Quotes

“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, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

“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, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

“...friendship stands as a small affront to the total control of all things by mass entertainment and mass media and mass education and mass politics. For wherever such friendships persist, there persists the possibility of imaginative leaps that threaten the comfort of the banal. For you look at the friend and you remember the past, and treasure it. You love the friend, and suddenly you understand that this life of ours cannot fully be described by the motion of particulate matter in empty space. You see instantly that politics fades into unimportance, with all its noisy glamour and empty promises. You feel that others before you have known what it is to have the true friend, the one before whom you can, as Cicero put it, think out loud. You feel that, and it is like an earnest of eternity, of being grounded in a a love and beauty and goodness that is at the heart of all ages, and that transcends them all. Pals we may have, in the flatlands of contemporary life. Political allies, sure. Coworkers, aplenty. But not friends.”
― Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

“And those characters [in a fairy tale] dwell in a moral world, whose laws are as clear as the law of gravity. That too is a great advantage of the folk tale. It is not a failure of imagination to see the sky blue. It is a failure rather to be weary of its being blue- and not to notice how blue it is. And appreciation of the subtler colors of the sky will come later. In the folk tale, good is good and evil is evil, and the former will triumph and later will fail. This is not the result of the imaginative quest. It is rather its principle and foundation. It is what will enable the child later on to understand Macbeth, or Don Quixote, or David Copperfield.”
― Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

“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, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

“For in those days I had no idea that many of the greatest books are like a forest, and that the best way to get to know them is to wander right into the middle and get lost.”
― Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

“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, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

“The past is dangerous, not least because it cannot go away. It is simply there, never to change, and in its constancy it reflects the eternity of God. It presents to the young mind a vast field of fascination, of war and peace, loyalty and treason, invention and folly, bitter twists of fate and sweet poetic justice. When that past is the past of one's people or country or church, then the danger is terrible indeed, because then the past makes claims upon our honor and allegiance. Then it knocks at the door, saying softly, "I am still here." And then our plans for social control—for inducing the kind of amnesia that has people always hankering after what is supposed to be new, without asking inconvenient questions about where the desirable thing has come from and where it will take us—must fail. For a man with a past may be free; but a man without a past, never.”
― Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

“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 Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

“The imagination opens out not principally to what it knows and finds familiar, but to what it does not know, what it finds strange, half hidden, robed with inaccessible light. The familiar too can be an object of wonder, but not by its familiarity: as when the hills I looked upon every morning of my youth suddenly seemed to reveal the thousands of years they were building, long before any man ever left his traces on their slopes. Even the dog at my heels, then, like the dog who wagged his tail when Tobias and he finally came home, reveals itself the more, and is the greater object of wonder, the more I turn to it in love and see that, after all, I do not know him; for a dog too proclaims the wisdom of God.
It is, in the first instance, the very idea of God that guarantees that we can never reduce anything in creation merely to the stuff of which it consists. And, as for God Himself, what greater object of wonder can there be than one who is not the greatest thing-in-the-world, but beyond the world, of whom all things great and small declare, “He made us, we did not make ourselves”?”
― Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

“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 that some of it might open our own 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, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

“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 ware-housed efficiently, and brought with as little resistance as possible into the Digital Age.”
― Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

“It’s ironic, but true, that one of the qualifications of the modern librarian is a distaste for books. They take up space, and space, the librarians complain, is limited.”
― Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

“The sky suggests the vastness of creation and the smallness of man's ambition. It startles us out of our dreams of vanity, it silences our pride, it stills the lust to get and spend. It is more dangerous for a human soul to fall into than for a human body to fall out of.”
― Anthony M. Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

“Now take the child from that mother, and place him somewhere else. Not in another home, among different people who love him—and who will be sources of mystery to him, too. Not with his Aunt Violet or with his grandmother, nor even with the kind old lady next door. Place him with—here is the crucial word—a professional. Place him in the context of a money-making—here is another crucial word—industry. Take him to those functional places with tellingly abstract and impersonal names, like the Early Learning Center, or the Tiny Tots Academy. Place him among professional caregivers, rather like people who will walk and feed your dog at the kennel, only much nicer. They will feed the child, will parcel out the child's day with appropriate Learning Activities, will enforce the scheduled Naptime, and will send him home clean, well-fed, generally contented, runny-nosed, patted, played with, and unloved. Thus will his natural hunger for love be filled instead with the pleasantly functional. He will have no complaints about the Choo-Choo Child Connection. It may, in fact, be the only time in his day that he will run into other children. And he will be all the readier for school. Not only because he will be able to say his ABC’s. He will be ready to see himself and everyone else in the school as ciphers in an institution built to serve a certain function. Charles”
― Anthony M. Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

“So if we wish to cramp the moral imaginations of our children, we must tarnish the genuine heroes of our past, and at the same time place mirrors for self-adulation everywhere. Everyone is creative, everyone is “original.” Every one of the millions of lemmings is to believe himself a “leader of tomorrow,” leading tomorrow in perfectly predictable fashion right over the edge of the cliff and into the sea. Everyone must go to college, not to learn something about Homer and Thomas Aquinas, but to be a college graduate, to be somebody.”
― Anthony M. Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

“People who can organize themselves and accomplish something as devilishly complicated as a good ballgame are hard to herd around. They can form societies of their own. They become men and women, not human resources. They can be free.”
― Anthony M. Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

“People with a strong sense of being embodied creatures, rather than being bundles of appetite provided with the machinery of a body to work upon, will prove difficult to persuade in the coming century of the biotechnocrats.”
― Anthony M. Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

“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, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

“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”
― Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

“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, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

“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.”
― Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

“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, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child