All Allan Bloom Quotes
- 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… Alive
- 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… Accepting
- Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. Absence
- 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… All
- There is a perennial and unobtrusive view that morality consists in such things as telling the truth, paying one's debts, respecting one's parents and doing… All
- Openness, as currently conceived, is a way of making surrender to whatever is most powerful, or worship of vulgar success, look principled. Conceived
- 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… Any
- The facile economic and psychological debunking of the theoretical life cannot do away with its irreducible beauties. Beauties
- 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… All
- Never did I think that the university was properly ministerial to the society around it. Rather I thought and think that society is ministerial to… Bless
- University convention submerges nature. It issues licenses, and hunting without one is forbidden. Convention
- 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… Absolutely
- The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contraditory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth, of… All
- Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidiest and most pernicious illusion. Belief
- Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment. Alone
- 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… All
- Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication. Absence
- The real community of man is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers. Community