Out of the Ashes Quotes

“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, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child

“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, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child

“The value of the old liberal education was not that it made men “well-rounded,” like a ball bearing, but that it gave them the freedom of the height and breadth and depth of human experience, including man’s mysterious encounter with his Creator. To”
― Anthony Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child

“Virtue humanizes and spiritualizes what is part animal in us. Vice brutalizes what is human and spiritual in us.”
― Anthony Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child

“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, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child

“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, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture

“Until the sexual revolution, most people understood that customs and laws regarding sex were customs and laws to strengthen or at least to protect the family, and that the family was not something created by the State, but was its own small kingdom, a natural society, founded in the bodily nature of man.”
― Anthony Esolen, Defending Marriage: Twelve Arguments for Sanity

“the phrase “stay-at-home mom” is patronizing and faintly derogatory, like “stick-in-the-mud mom” or “sit-in-the-corner mom.” Do we talk about a “chained-to-the-desk mom” or a “stuck-in-traffic mom” or a “languishing-in-meetings mom”?”
― Anthony M. Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture

“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, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child

“There’s all the difference in the world between teaching a human being and sanding the gears in a machine. The machine does a job. The human being embarks on a quest. The machine hums a dreary, constant drone. The human being sings. One”
― Anthony Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child

“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, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child

“Truly tolerant people are hard to offend.”
― Anthony M. Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture

“Romano Guardini, surveying the moral and intellectual ruin that was Europe after the Second World War, wrote that we had entered the era of “mass man,” that the individual was being submerged beneath phenomena of the masses, which did not rise to the status of a true culture. Mass man has no culture, no real home, no transcendent object of devotion, no aim but what is given to him in and through mass education, mass entertainment, and mass politics. He floats on the seas willy-nilly, like a jellyfish, without a mind and a North Star to guide him. He gives in, he goes along. He lives, easily and uneventfully, Life Under Compulsion. Submerged”
― Anthony M. Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child

“democracy can make common cause with tyranny quite well, for along with a “manly and lawful passion for equality … there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom.” It”
― Anthony Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child

“It is easy to be loyal when loyalty costs you nothing. But when the hard times come, as come they must; when conversation is strained, and even the bed brings no real pleasure; when the future seems but an interminable stretch of cloud and rain; then only the vow stands between marriage and divorce, and then it is that married couples most need the moral suasion and support of a genuine culture about them. To say, “We will not hold you to your vow” is to say, in effect, “You cannot really make a vow to begin with.” But it is essential to our humanity to promise ourselves; we can only find happiness by giving away our pursuit of it; we know joy when we open ourselves up to its free arrival; it is better to be chosen than to choose. Many men and women in difficult marriages would learn these things eventually, if we did our duty by them and held them to their vows when they were weak. Many, knowing from the outset that a vow is a vow, will come to those conclusions naturally without the difficult lessons.”
― Anthony Esolen, Defending Marriage: Twelve Arguments for Sanity

“What we cannot have, as I’ve said, is half a jungle. We can’t have the world in which men and women love one another and raise healthy families, with almost all children born within wedlock and almost all children living with both parents, and their children in turn visiting their still-married grandparents, if at the same time we welcome the rest of the chaos. You can’t have a child-friendly and marriage-friendly street with a porn shop and a strip club on it. The principle that the sexual “fulfillment” of adults is trumps must bear fruit accordingly. It is too wild a thing to nip here and there. It has to be uprooted. It is unworthy of a civilized and self-governing people.”
― Anthony Esolen, Defending Marriage: Twelve Arguments for Sanity

“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, Defending Marriage: Twelve Arguments for Sanity

“I stand with Livy, who at the final hardening of Rome’s republican arteries, wrote that the study of his land’s history was the study of the rise and fall of moral strength, with duty and severity giving way to ambition, avarice, and license, till his fellow Romans “sank lower and lower, and finally began the downward plunge which has brought us to the present time, when we can endure neither our vices nor their cure.”
― Anthony M. Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture

“after all these programs and scholarships, after all the work done by organized athletics at all levels, the number of boys actually playing baseball or football is far lower than before: no one is outdoors playing.”
― Anthony M. Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child

“Every single pagan philosopher of the ancient world said that if you wanted to be free, you had to learn the hard ways of virtue and that the worst form of slavery was slavery to your own appetites.”
― Anthony M. Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture

“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, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child

“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.”
― Anthony Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child

“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”
― Anthony Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child

“Virtue liberates; vice enslaves. A passion for genuine beauty liberates;”
― Anthony Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child

“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 Esolen, Defending Marriage: Twelve Arguments for Sanity

“Again I insist upon the point. The whole of the sexual revolution has been a colossal failure, and has wrought untold human misery. The move for same-sex pseudogamy is inextricable from that revolution; it is grafted upon it and cannot survive or even appear to make sense without it. We cannot have a good nation unless we are a good people. We cannot be a good people when we throw contempt upon manhood and womanhood and the virtue that honors their beauty and their being for one another; it is like asking for clean sleaze, or cold love.”
― Anthony Esolen, Defending Marriage: Twelve Arguments for Sanity

“Our freedom is a personal freedom only when, in it and through it, our persons may flourish, but that is so only in love.”
― Anthony Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child

“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, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child

“There are only two things wrong with our schools: everything that our children don’t learn there and everything they do. The public schools, with their vast political and bureaucratic machinery, are beyond reform. That does not mean that persons of good will should not offer themselves up as missionaries of truth and goodness and beauty, to teach there, as in partibus furibundis. But we would be quite mad to send our children there. We send missionaries to cannibals. We do not serve the cannibals our boys and girls.”
― Anthony M. Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture

“For the mob is a congregation of compulsions. It does not matter who or what squats upon the altar: Robespierre, Beelzebub, Mussolini, Belial, any political or social savior with the sibilant speech and the slick tongue, hissing out every other word with its suffix -ism. The people will be saved not by the grace of God, not by any act of faith, hope, or charity. They will be saved because they belong to the right mob. They think they have pulled the lever of righteousness, but they are themselves the levers that are pulled. A mob is not a great cloud of witnesses. It is not a gathering of friends for a wedding feast. It is a herd of enemies who have fused their enmity with the cause, whereof they are the willing effects. Witness the goings-on when a politician dies. No one, in Life Under Compulsion, says to himself, “The fearful reckoning he meets may be mine, soon.” They turn the funeral into a political event. They must: they are marionettes and they will dance. They look over the shoulder to see who gets the prime time for the moist eye and the hitch in the voice.”
― Anthony M. Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child