All Allan Bloom Quotes
- 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… Able
- Authentic values are those by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts. Authentic
- 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? Easy
- Education is the movement from darkness to light. Darkness
- 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… All
- Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music. Addiction
- 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
- 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… Beautiful
- 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… Arrive
- 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… All
- As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead. Dead
- Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice. Form
- The students [of the 60s] substituted conspicuous compassion for their parents conspicuous consumption. Compassion
- The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself. Age
- 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… Abortion
- 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… Absorbed
- 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… Circus
- 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… Accepted
- There is no real education that does not respond to felt need; anything else acquired is trifling display. Acquired
- 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… Children
- The self is the modern substitute for the soul. Modern
- 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… Attraction
- 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… Autonomously
- I am not a conservative — neo or paleo. Conservatism is a respectable outlook... I just do not happen to be that animal. Animal
- The substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for. Been