Allan Bloom Quotes

#1. But nowhere is this a more urgent task than in matters of eros, the first and best hope of human connectedness in a world where all connectedness has become problematic

Allan Bloom

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

Allan Bloom

#3. 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

#4. Education is the movement from darkness to light.

Allan Bloom

#5. 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

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

Allan Bloom

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

Allan Bloom

#8. 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.

Allan Bloom

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

Allan Bloom

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

Allan Bloom

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

Allan Bloom

#12. 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

#13. Only when the true ends of society have nothing to do with the sublime does "culture" become necessary as a veneer to cover over the void. Culture can at best appreciate the monuments of earlier faith; it cannot produce them.

Allan Bloom

#14. It is easy today to deny God's creativity as a thing of the benighted past, overcome by science, but man's creativity, a thing much more improbable and nothing but an imitation of God's, exercises a strange attraction.

Allan Bloom

#15. 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.

Allan Bloom

#16. The first discipline modernity's originators imposed upon themselves was that of self-restraint, learning to live with vulgarity. Their high expectations for effectiveness were made possible by low expectations of what was to be.

Allan Bloom

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

Allan Bloom

#18. 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

#19. Plato ... says a multitude can never philosophize and hence can never recognize the seriousness of philosophy or who really philosophizes. Attempting to influence the multitude results in forced prostitution.

Allan Bloom

#20. The end result is that there can be no more truth or goodness and no need or even ability to make tough choices. Where the purpose of higher education once was to enable the student to find truth, the modern university teaches that there is no truth, only 'lifestyle.

Allan Bloom

#21. 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.

Allan Bloom

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

Allan Bloom

#23. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of property were just what Aristotle did not talk about. They are the conditions of happiness; but the essence of happiness, according to Aristotle, is virtue. So the moderns decided to deal with the conditions and to let happiness take care of itself.

Allan Bloom

#24. 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.

Allan Bloom

#25. Various kinds of self-forgetting, usually accompanied by illusions and myths, make it possible to live without the intransigent facing of death-in the sense of always thinking about it and what it means for life and the things dear in life-which is characteristic of a serious life.

Allan Bloom

#26. Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise
as priests, prophets or philosophers are wise. Specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.

Allan Bloom

#27. 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.

Allan Bloom

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

Allan Bloom

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

Allan Bloom

#30. Nietzsche said the newspaper had replaced the prayer in the life of the modern bourgeois , meaning that the busy, the cheap, the ephemeral, had usurped all that remained of the eternal in his daily life.

Allan Bloom

#31. Intellectuals ... advertise their superiority to political practice but are absolutely in its thrall ... It is no accident that Marxist theory and practice use the intellectuals as tools and keep them in brutal subservience.

Allan Bloom

#32. [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.

Allan Bloom

#33. [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.

Allan Bloom

#34. The distinction between private and public undermines the unity of spiritual strength, draining the public of the transcendent energies while trivializing them because the merely private life provides no proper stage for their action.

Allan Bloom

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

#36. 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

#37. The self is the modern substitute for the soul.

Allan Bloom

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

Allan Bloom

#39. A new language always reflects a new point of view, and the gradual unconscious popularization of new words, or of old words used in new ways, is a sure sign of a profound change in people's articulation of the world.

Allan Bloom

#40. Culture as art is the peak expression of man's creativity, his capacity to break out of nature's narrow bounds, and hence out of the degrading interpretation of man in modern natural and political science.

Allan Bloom

#41. Utopianism is, as Plato taught us at the outset, the fire with which we must play because it is the only way we can find out what we are. We need to criticize false understandings of Utopia, but the easy way out provided by realism is deadly.

Allan Bloom

#42. A serious life means being fully aware of the alternatives, thinking about them with all the intensity one brings to bear on life-and-death questions, in full recognition that every choice is a great risk with necessary consequences that are hard to bear.

Allan Bloom

#43. Rock gives children, on a silver platter, with all the public authority of the entertainment industry, everything their parents always used to tell them they had to wait for until they grew up and would understand later.

Allan Bloom

#44. The humanities are like the great old Paris Flea Market where, amidst masses of junk, people with a good eye found cast away treasures ... They are like a refugee camp where all the geniuses driven out of their jobs and countries by unfriendly regimes are idling.

Allan Bloom

#45. Historicism and cultural relativism actually are a means to avoid testing our own prejudices and asking, for example, whether men are really equal or whether that opinion is merely a democratic prejudice.

Allan Bloom

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

Allan Bloom

#47. I have no desire ... to preach a high-minded and merely edifying version of love

Allan Bloom

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

Allan Bloom

#49. 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 ...

Allan Bloom

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

Allan Bloom

#51. The real community of man is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers.

Allan Bloom

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

Allan Bloom

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason's power.

Allan Bloom

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

Allan Bloom

#57. 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.

Allan Bloom

#58. 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.

Allan Bloom

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

Allan Bloom

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

Allan Bloom

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

Allan Bloom

#62. One has to have the experience of really believing before one can have the thrill of liberation.

Allan Bloom

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

Allan Bloom

#64. 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.

Allan Bloom

#65. 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

#66. Shakespeare is to me the purest voice of nature, and he does no meddle with nature. His plays provide us with the greatest variety of erotic expression, and with Shakespeare eros is the proper term to use.

Allan Bloom

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

Allan Bloom

#68. 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

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

Allan Bloom

#70. 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

#71. Human nature must not be altered in order to have a problem-free world. Man is not just a problem-solving being, as behaviorists would wish us to believe, but a problem-recognizing and -accepting being.

Allan Bloom

#72. I suggest that we need a generation or two not of theory but of an attempt to discover the real phenomena of eros.

Allan Bloom

#73. Children tend to be rather better observers of adults' characters than adults are of children's, because children are so dependent on adults that it is very much in their interest to discover the weaknesses of their elders.

Allan Bloom

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

Allan Bloom

#75. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.

Allan Bloom

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

Allan Bloom

#77. 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

#78. Professors of Greek forget or are unaware that Thomas Aquinas, who did not know Greek, was a better interpreter of Aristotle than any of them have proved to be, not only because he was smarter but because he took Aristotle more seriously.

Allan Bloom

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

Allan Bloom

#80. Every age is blind to its own worst madness.

Allan Bloom

#81. 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.

Allan Bloom

#82. We witness a strange inversion: on the one hand, the endeavor to turn the social contract into a less calculating and more feeling connection among its members; on the other hand, the endeavor to turn the erotic relationship into a contractual one.

Allan Bloom

#83. 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.

Allan Bloom