9 Quotes by Anthony M. Esolen

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.

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.

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.

To give yourself over to an evil is, in some measure, to pretend that what you know is wrong is right, and then, to justify yourself, you must give yourself over to it all the more.

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

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.

Truly tolerant people are hard to offend.

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.

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.