Allan Bloom Quotes

Education is the movement from darkness to light.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Once the law is broken with impunity, each man regains the right to any means he deems proper or necessary in order to defend himself against the new tyrant, the one who can break the law.

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

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

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

Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise... specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.

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

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

Education is not the taming or domestication of the soul's raw passions - not suppressing them or excising them, which would deprive the soul of its energy - but forming and informing them as art.

[Rock and the intellectual Left] must both be interpreted as parts of the cultural fabric of late capitalism. Their success comes from the bourgeois' need to feel that he is not bourgeois.

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.

Every age is blind to its own worst madness.

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

All literature up to today is sexist. The Muses never sang to the poets about liberated women. It's the same old chanson from the Bible and Homer through Joyce and Proust.

Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it.

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

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

There is no real teacher who in practise does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech.

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.

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

We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished.

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?

[A]ny notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as men's taste and capacity to live it, had disappeared. Leisure became entertainment.

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

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

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

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

The self is the modern substitute for the soul.

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

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

The students [of the 60's] substituted conspicuous compassion for their parents' conspicuous consumption.

It may well be that a societys greatest madness seems normal to itself.

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

These sociologists who talk to facilely about the sacred are like a man who keeps a toothless old circus lion around the house in order to experience the thrills of the jungle.

University convention submerges nature. It issues licenses, and hunting without one is forbidden.

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

The importance of these [college] years for an American cannot be overestimated. They are civilization's only chance to get to him.

Socrates' way of life is the consequence of his recognition that we can know what it is that we do not know about the most important things and that we are by nature obliged to seek that knowledge.

The distinction between the world of commerce and that of "culture" quickly became the distinction between infrastructure and superstructure, with the former clearly determining the latter.

Bacon, Locke, Descartes, Hume, and all the others knew they were giving rights to vulgarity. But in so doing in addition to caring for man's well-being they were providing rights for themselves.

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

Classical music is a special taste like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand.

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

Education is not sermonizing to children against their instincts and pleasures, but providing a natural continuity between what they feel and what they can and should be.