Allan Bloom Short Quotes

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The spirit is at home, if not entirely satisfied, in America.

Allan Bloom
As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.

Allan Bloom
Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.

Allan Bloom
The substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for.

Allan Bloom
An education, other than purely professional or technical, can even seem to be an impediment.

Allan Bloom
The essence of philosophy is the abandonment of all authority in favor of individual human reason.

Allan Bloom
The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.

Allan Bloom
The artist is the most interesting of all phenomena, for he represents creativity, the definition of man.

Allan Bloom
There is no real education that does not respond to felt need; anything else acquired is trifling display.

Allan Bloom
Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidiest and most pernicious illusion.

Allan Bloom
This nation's impulse is toward the future, and tradition seems more of a shackle to it than an inspiration.

Allan Bloom
Law may prescribe that the male nipples be made equal to the female ones, but they still will not give milk.

Allan Bloom
Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment.

Allan Bloom
The facile economic and psychological debunking of the theoretical life cannot do away with its irreducible beauties.

Allan Bloom
Authentic values are those by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts.

Allan Bloom
The sirens sing sotto voce these days, and the young already have enough wax in their ears to pass them by without danger.

Allan Bloom
I am not a conservative — neo or paleo. Conservatism is a respectable outlook,... I just do not happen to be that animal.

Allan Bloom
Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication.

Allan Bloom
Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.

Allan Bloom
Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts.

Allan Bloom
Openness, as currently conceived, is a way of making surrender to whatever is most powerful, or worship of vulgar success, look principled.

Allan Bloom
Self-interest is hostile to the common good, but enlightened self-interest is not. And this is the best key to the meaning of enlightenment.

Allan Bloom
To recognize that some of the things our culture believes are not true imposes on us the duty of finding out which are true and which are not.

Allan Bloom
The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities.

Allan Bloom
Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labor, that he was ignorant. Now every high-school student knows that. How did it become so easy?

Allan Bloom
The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Allan Bloom
We need history, not to tell us what happened or to explain the past, but to make the past alive so that it can explain us and make a future possible.

Allan Bloom
The expectation of substantive unity between natural science and social science has faded.... Gone is the cosmic intention of placing man in the universe.

Allan Bloom
Did Romeo and Juliet have a … relationship? The term relationship … betokens a chaste egalitarianism leveling different ranks and degrees of attachment.

Allan Bloom
There is one thing that a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.

Allan Bloom