Various kinds of self-forgetting, usually accompanied by illusions and myths, make it possible to live without the intransigent facing of death-in the… — Allan Bloom Copy Share Image
The first discipline modernity's originators imposed upon themselves was that of self-restraint, learning to live with vulgarity. Their high expectations for effectiveness… — Allan Bloom Copy Share Image
Locke had illegitimately selected those parts of man he needed for his social contract and suppressed all the rest, a theoretically unsatisfactory… — Allan Bloom Copy Share Image
The de-eroticization of the world, a companion to its disenchantment ... seems to result from a combination of causes our democratic regime… — Allan Bloom Copy Share Image
The self must be a tense bow. It must struggle with opposites rather than harmonize them, rather than turn the tension over… — Allan Bloom Copy Share Image
The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contraditory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek… — Allan Bloom Copy Share Image
Self-interest is hostile to the common good, but enlightened self-interest is not. And this is the best key to the meaning of… — Allan Bloom Copy Share Image
The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek… — 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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidiest and most pernicious illusion. — Allan Bloom Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image