Allan Bloom

The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.

— Allan Bloom

Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral…

— Allan Bloom

There is no real teacher who in practice does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that…

— Allan Bloom

Education is not sermonizing to children against their instincts and pleasures, but providing a natural continuity between what they feel and what…

— Allan Bloom

Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labor, that he was ignorant. Now every high-school student knows that. How did it…

— Allan Bloom

To recognize that some of the things our culture believes are not true imposes on us the duty of finding out which…

— Allan Bloom

Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it…

— Allan Bloom

Classical music is a special taste like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand.

— Allan Bloom

The self must be a tense bow. It must struggle with opposites rather than harmonize them, rather than turn the tension over…

— Allan Bloom

Social science and humanities ... have a mutual contempt for one another, the former looking down on the latter as unscientific, the…

— Allan Bloom

A serious life means being fully aware of the alternatives, thinking about them with all the intensity one brings to bear on…

— Allan Bloom

“Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even specially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts.…

— Allan Bloom

Education is not the taming or domestication of the soul's raw passions - not suppressing them or excising them, which would deprive…

— Allan Bloom

The humanities are like the great old Paris Flea Market where, amidst masses of junk, people with a good eye found cast…

— Allan Bloom

The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of…

— Allan Bloom

Professors of Greek forget or are unaware that Thomas Aquinas, who did not know Greek, was a better interpreter of Aristotle than…

— Allan Bloom

Locke had illegitimately selected those parts of man he needed for his social contract and suppressed all the rest, a theoretically unsatisfactory…

— Allan Bloom

“It’s not easy to go through, you happy man,” I said. “Even more than what we went through before, it admits of…

— Allan Bloom

Our Nation, a great stage for the acting out of great thoughts, presents the classic confrontation between Locke's views of the state…

— Allan Bloom

Americans ... do not naturally apply the term "bourgeois" to themselves, or to anyone else for that matter. They do like to…

— Allan Bloom

There are two threats to reason, the opinion that one knows the truth about the most important things and the opinion that…

— Allan Bloom

I am now even more persuaded of the urgent need to study why Socrates was accused. The dislike of philosophy is perennial,…

— Allan Bloom

“Although the natural rights inherent in our( Constitutional) regime are adequate to the solution of this ( minority) problem...the equal protection of…

— Allan Bloom

The old view was that delicacy of language was part of the nature, the sacred nature, of eros and that to speak…

— Allan Bloom

Shakespeare did not consider himself the legislator of mankind. He faithfully records man's problems and does not evidently propose to solve them.

— Allan Bloom

Did Romeo and Juliet have a ... "relationship"? The term "relationship" ... betokens a chaste egalitarianism leveling different ranks and degrees of attachment.

— Allan Bloom

The expectation of substantive unity between natural science and social science has faded… Gone is the cosmic intention of placing man in…

— Allan Bloom

Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion.

— Allan Bloom

[A]ny notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as men's taste and capacity to live it, had disappeared. Leisure became…

— Allan Bloom

Shakespeare is practically our only link with the classic and the past. The future of education has much to do with whether…

— Allan Bloom

Law may prescribe that the male nipples be made equal to the female ones, but they still will not give milk.

— Allan Bloom

Authentic values are those by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts.

— Allan Bloom

“One has to have the experience of really believing before one can have the thrill of liberation.”

— Allan Bloom

The facile economic and psychological debunking of the theoretical life cannot do away with its irreducible beauties.

— Allan Bloom

The importance of these [college] years for an American cannot be overestimated. They are civilization's only chance to get to him.

— Allan Bloom

Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidiest and most pernicious illusion.

— Allan Bloom

The way I knew I was right about something was the kids got angry. That's very important: you touch that anger.

— Allan Bloom

Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment.

— Allan Bloom

We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished.

— Allan Bloom

I am not a conservative — neo or paleo. Conservatism is a respectable outlook... I just do not happen to be that animal.

— Allan Bloom