Allan Bloom Quotes

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

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.

Most of all I admire Mozart's capacity to be both deep and rational, a combination often said to be impossible.

Education is the movement from darkness to light

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.

True openness is the accompaniment of the desire to know, hence of the awareness of ignorance. To deny the possibility of knowing good and bad is to suppress true openness.