6
" 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
15
" Look for instance at the notorious Dan Savage, the gay advice columnist whose work is featured in arts newspapers across the country. His language is habitually violent and obscene. He seems to be filled with hatred against anybody who believes in anything less than what the furthest advanced of the sexual revolutionaries demand. It’s a mark of our madness and irresponsibility that this fellow, who is deeply unbalanced, is invited to public schools to advise the students that being homosexual “gets better,” thus encouraging them in the kinds of sexual experimentation that would land some of them at the same horrible place where he himself is standing. When, at one school, he began to rail against Jesus, some of the Christian students quietly got up and left the hall, whereupon he subjected them to a volley of ridicule, to the applause of some of their fellows in the audience. I cannot imagine for any reason subjecting young people to ridicule. But the self-contradiction seems to have escaped the notice of the promoters of Savage, who is pretending to go about fighting the bullies, when he himself is a bully, spoiled, hurt, angry, and vindictive, as even a passing acquaintance with his advice would show. Porn’s all right for him, mutually agreed-upon cruelty, multiple partners, prostitution, whatever; everything is all right except what really is all right. Yet for all his wealth and fame, he hasn’t gotten better at all. "
― Anthony Esolen , Defending Marriage: Twelve Arguments for Sanity
20
" ...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
