North star Quote by Anthony M. Esolen

““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 devotion, no aim but what is given to him in and through mass education, mass entertainment, and mass politics. He floats on the seas willy-nilly, like a jellyfish, without a mind and a North Star to guide him. He gives in, he goes along. He lives, easily and uneventfully, Life Under Compulsion. Submerged””

Anthony M. Esolen

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More by Anthony M. Esolen

“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

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“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…

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“the judge Don Achille speaks up, with sly and devastating irony, saying that the whole history of mankind is the history of rhetoric: that is, the history of moving masses of people by words, words, words. That is all there is in Political Life Under Compulsion. Words are not troves of truth or bands of friendship. They are tools, and…

Anthony M. Esolen

“The computer on the desk of the student in school knows no history. It is not like a book, worn at the edges by…

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“To give yourself over to an evil is, in some measure, to pretend that what you know is wrong is right, and then, to…

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“Truly tolerant people are hard to offend.”

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“after all these programs and scholarships, after all the work done by organized athletics at all levels, the number of boys actually playing baseball…

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“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…

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

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“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…

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“What Homer could never have foreseen is the double idiocy into which we now educate our children. We have what look like our equivalent…

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“For the mob is a congregation of compulsions. It does not matter who or what squats upon the altar: Robespierre, Beelzebub, Mussolini, Belial, any…

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Explore all 13 Anthony M. Esolen quotes

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