“So let us see how we can ensure that the child will grow up taking it as normal that other people will simply be the operators of impersonal functions. The first thing to do is to remove him from people he loves, and who love him in turn...”
— Anthony Esolen

“So instead we want what is pleasant and smooth. It should not be a perversion of the human, so much as an evasion of it...a deadening.”
— Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, Anthony Esolen

Anthony Esolen on the French philosopher (b. 1946) Philippe Beneton's definition of modernity.

“The danger is that in a moment of silence the strangeness and wonder of this world might overtake them. And if that happens, they will be lost to us. They will live in the world, but as if it had an extra dimension or two in invisible to most.”
— Anthony Esolen

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

“It isn't just the deeply learned art that finds God the object of devotion and imaginative wonder. Look at this rose window from Chartres Cathedral, with its play of light & color, its network of visual patterns and theological symbolism. That is folk art at its most ambitious.”

“And there were other forms of art that the muscular faith of the Middle Ages revived, and not for a few wealthy donors either, but for everyone with eyes to see and ears to hear.” — Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, Anthony Esolen

“People do not paint, in rapture, the rise of the dollar on the world money market.”
— Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, Anthony Esolen

“‘This is all there is,’ we say, ’and don't ask us where it is going, or what it means, because it is going to destruction only, and it means nothing. Now build a cathedral in honor of that.’”
— Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, Anthony Esolen

“The fundamental heresy, which is to believe that there is nothing to believe, because all is matter, and matter, finally, has no meaning.” — Anthony Esolen