Life Under Compulsion Quotes

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

“when people accuse us of being retrograde, or medieval, or puritanical—all words rummaged out of the box labeled “Not Progressive”—we should shrug, as if they had accused us of walking on two feet, and”
― Anthony Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child

“So we teach them how to sit still, how to obey bells, how to make insipid clichés pass for thought, how to be “subversive” in trivial and uniform ways, how to think “outside the box” of tradition and wisdom and into the stainless steel cage of the politically “correct,” how to extend the political pinky while sipping the political tea.”
― Anthony Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child

“But it is often easier to compel a hundred people to do what you could never compel one person to do. The lone man must consult his conscience, that stern and unflattering arbiter. A man in a crowd, though, can turn to the others, as the others turn to one another, each justifying the deed by referring to the next man, or to the force of all the men together. This”
― Anthony M. Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child

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

“What Homer could never have foreseen is the double idiocy into which we now educate our children. We have what look like our equivalent to the Greek “assemblies”; we can watch them on cable television, as long as one can endure them. For they are charades of political action. They concern themselves constantly, insufferably, about every tiniest feature of human existence, but without slow deliberation, without balance, without any commitment to the difficult virtues. We do not have men locked in intellectual battle with other men, worthy opponents both, as Thomas Paine battled with John Dickinson, or Daniel Webster with Robert Hayne. We have men strutting and mugging for women nagging and bickering. We have the sputters of what used to be language, “tweets,” expressions of something less than opinion. It is the urge to join—something, anything—while remaining aloof from the people who live next door, whose names we do not know. Aristotle once wrote that youths should not study politics, because they had not the wealth of human experience to allow for it; all would become for them abstract and theoretical, like mathematics, which the philosopher said was more suitable for them. He concluded that men should begin to study politics at around the age of forty. Whether that wisdom would help us now, I don’t know.”
― Anthony M. Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child

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

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

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

“Because he learns, he grows so well into manhood that, when he finally meets his father on land again, he can speak to him frankly and sensibly about his future. He is no longer a silly spoiled brat. He has grown into freedom.”
― Anthony Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child

“Now look at how we treat children. They are kenneled up nine months of the year, institutionalized ten hours a day. We persist in believing that children, because they are intelligent, are more malleable than dogs. Notice the word taken from metallurgy. We will not see that it is just because they are intelligent that their teaching can never be training and can never subordinate the personal to the mechanical. They need to learn more than the rules. They need to learn the ropes. They need to do more than learn laws. They need to be inspired to loyalty. They need the adventure of love.”
― Anthony Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child

“But even those reminders would not really do good work if they were not salted with the affection that the older men clearly show for the kid, as is shown by Jack’s calling him Harve for short. A human being is meant to be taught by human beings for human things. That can never be accomplished by mere methods.”
― Anthony Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child