Allan Bloom - The Closing of the American Mind (1987)

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

Allan Bloom
Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to seek that completion.

Allan Bloom
We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.

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

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

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

Allan Bloom
The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.

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
Science, in freeing men, destroys the natural condition that makes them human. Hence, for the first time in history, there is the possibility of a tyranny grounded not on ignorance, but on science.

Allan Bloom