Allan Bloom Quotes - Page 2

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• This nation's impulse is toward the future, and tradition seems more of a shackle to it than an inspiration.

  Allan Bloom

  Inspiration, Tradition, Shackles

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.244, Simon and Schuster

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

  Allan Bloom

  People, Deeds, Form

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.201, Simon and Schuster

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• An education, other than purely professional or technical, can even seem to be an impediment.

  Allan Bloom

  Education, Impediments, Seems

  Allan Bloom (1988). “Closing of the American Mind”, Simon & Schuster

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

  Allan Bloom

  Important, Age, Reason

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.253, Simon and Schuster

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• Social science and humanities ... have a mutual contempt for one another, the former looking down on the latter as unscientific, the latter regarding the former as philistine. ... The difference comes down to the fact that social science really wants to be predictive, meaning that man is predictable, while the humanities say that he is not.

  Allan Bloom

  Men, Differences, Humanity

  "The Closing of the American Mind". Book by Allan Bloom, 1987.

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• Life, liberty, and the pursuit of property were just what Aristotle did not talk about. They are the conditions of happiness; but the essence of happiness, according to Aristotle, is virtue. So the moderns decided to deal with the conditions and to let happiness take care of itself.

  Allan Bloom

  Essence, Liberty, Care

  "Giants and Dwarfs". Book by Allan Bloom. Chapter: "Commerce and Culture," p. 284, 1990.

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• As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.

  Allan Bloom

  Tradition

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.58, Simon and Schuster

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• The de-eroticization of the world, a companion to its disenchantment ... seems to result from a combination of causes our democratic regime and its tendencies toward leveling and self-protection, a reductionist-materialist science that inevitably interprets eros as sex, and the atmosphere generated by "the death of God" and of the subordinate god, Eros.

  Allan Bloom

  Sex, Self, Atmosphere

  Allan David Bloom (1993). “Love and Friendship”

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• 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 no voluntary harm to anyone. Those are all things easy to say and hard to do; they do not attract much attention, and win little honor in the world.

  Allan Bloom

  Winning, Views, Parent

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• The substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for.

  Allan Bloom

  Book, Substance, Care

  Allan Bloom (1988). “Closing of the American Mind”, Simon & Schuster

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• Nietzsche said the newspaper had replaced the prayer in the life of the modern bourgeois , meaning that the busy, the cheap, the ephemeral, had usurped all that remained of the eternal in his daily life.

  Allan Bloom

  Prayer, Ephemeral, Daily Life

  Allan Bloom (1988). “Closing of the American Mind”, Simon & Schuster

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

  Allan Bloom

  Errors, Tolerance, Enemy

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.43, Simon and Schuster

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• Most of all I admire Mozart's capacity to be both deep and rational, a combination often said to be impossible.

  Allan Bloom

  Impossible, Capacity, Said

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• Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.

  Allan Bloom

  Addiction, This Generation, Generations

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.68, Simon and Schuster

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• 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?

  Allan Bloom

  School, Ignorant, Students

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.43, Simon and Schuster

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• 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 to believe, but a problem-recognizing and -accepting being.

  Allan Bloom

  Believe, Men, Order

  "The Closing of the American Mind". Book by Allan Bloom, p. 229, 1987.

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• 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 enable them autonomously to seek that completion.

  Allan Bloom

  Education, Trying, Might

  Allan Bloom (1988). “Closing of the American Mind”, Simon & Schuster

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• 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 of it.

  Allan Bloom

  Learning, Cynical, Political

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.56, Simon and Schuster

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

  Allan Bloom

  Men, Taste, Leisure

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• The old view was that delicacy of language was part of the nature, the sacred nature, of eros and that to speak about it in any other way would be to misunderstand it. What has disappeared is the risk and the hope of human connectedness embedded in eros. Ours is a language that reduces the longing for an other to the need for individual, private satisfaction and safety.

  Allan Bloom

  Views, Safety, Risk

  "Love and Friendship". Book by Allan Bloom, pp. 13-14, 1993.

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• Plato says a multitude can never philosophize and hence can never recognize the seriousness of philosophy or who really philosophizes. Attempting to influence the multitude results in forced prostitution.

  Allan Bloom

  Plato, Philosophy, Influence

  "Giants and Dwarfs". Book by Allan Bloom. Chapter: "Commerce and Culture," p. 286, 1990.

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• Socrates' way of life is the consequence of his recognition that we can know what it is that we do not know about the most important things and that we are by nature obliged to seek that knowledge.

  Allan Bloom

  Important, Way, Recognition

  "Giants and Dwarfs". Book by Allan Bloom. Chapter: "Western Civ," p. 18, 1990.

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• It was not necessarily the best of times in America when Catholics and Protestants were suspicious of and hated one another; but at least they were taking their beliefs seriously, and the more or less satisfactory accommodations they worked out were not simply the result of apathy about the state of their souls.

  Allan Bloom

  America, Catholic, Soul

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.35, Simon and Schuster

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• The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers, that is, in principle, of all men to the extent they desire to know. But in fact this includes only a few, the true friends, as Plato was to Aristotle at the very moment they were disagreeing about the nature of the good.

  Allan Bloom

  Real, Men, Self

  "The Closing of the American Mind". Book by Allan Bloom, p. 381, 1987.

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• 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 us and make a future possible.

  Allan Bloom

  Past, Alive, Needs

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.239, Simon and Schuster

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