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 Copy Share Image
There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth… — Allan Bloom Copy Share
Authentic values are those by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts. — Allan Bloom Copy Share
Shakespeare's naturalness is attested to by the strange fact that he is the only classical author who remains popular. The critical termites are massed… — Allan Bloom Copy Share
The utilitarian behaves sensibly in all that is required for preservation but never takes account of the fact that he must die...His whole life… — Allan Bloom Copy Share
Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously… — Allan Bloom Copy Share
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… — Allan Bloom Copy Share
Never did I think that the university was properly ministerial to the society around it. Rather I thought and think that society is ministerial… — Allan Bloom Copy Share
Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidiest and most pernicious illusion. — Allan Bloom Copy Share
Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise... specialized… — Allan Bloom Copy Share
As Western nations became more prosperous, leisure, which had been put off for several centuries in favor of the pursuit of property, the means… — Allan Bloom Copy Share
Historicism and cultural relativism actually are a means to avoid testing our own prejudices and asking, for example, whether men are really equal or… — Allan Bloom Copy Share
“Man requires a healing education which returns him to himself. Rousseau's paradoxes- his attack on the arts and the sciences and his practice of… — Allan Bloom Copy Share
The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now… — Allan Bloom Copy Share
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of property were just what Aristotle did not talk about. They are the conditions of happiness; but the essence… — Allan Bloom Copy Share
