Allan Bloom Quotes

60 quotes in 947 categories

• 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…
• Authentic values are those by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts.
• 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?
• Education is the movement from darkness to light.
• 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…
• Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.
• The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.
• Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.
• The students [of the 60s] substituted conspicuous compassion for their parents conspicuous consumption.
• The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.
• Our Nation, a great stage for the acting out of great thoughts, presents the classic confrontation between Locke's views of the state of nature and…
• 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 is…
• 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…
• Sycophancy toward those who hold power is a fact in every regime, and especially in a democracy, where, unlike tyranny, there is an accepted principle…
• 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…

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