“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… — Anthony M. Esolen Copy Share Image
“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… — Anthony M. Esolen Copy Share
“If you knew there was a beach where you could pick up gold nuggets like pebble stones, would you not go there? Go there.” — Anthony M. Esolen Copy Share Image
“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… — Anthony M. Esolen Copy Share
“the judge Don Achille speaks up, with sly and devastating irony, saying that the whole history of mankind is the history of rhetoric: that… — Anthony M. Esolen Copy Share Image
“The computer on the desk of the student in school knows no history. It is not like a book, worn at the edges by… — Anthony M. Esolen Copy Share Image
“To give yourself over to an evil is, in some measure, to pretend that what you know is wrong is right, and then, to… — Anthony M. Esolen Copy Share Image
“after all these programs and scholarships, after all the work done by organized athletics at all levels, the number of boys actually playing baseball… — Anthony M. Esolen Copy Share Image
“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… — Anthony M. Esolen Copy Share Image
“Millions of women rose up, said G. K. Chesterton, to declare that they would no longer be dictated to, and promptly became stenographers. Why” — Anthony M. Esolen Copy Share Image
“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… — Anthony M. Esolen Copy Share Image
“What Homer could never have foreseen is the double idiocy into which we now educate our children. We have what look like our equivalent… — Anthony M. Esolen Copy Share Image
