Allan Bloom Quotes - Page 3

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• We witness a strange inversion: on the one hand, the endeavor to turn the social contract into a less calculating and more feeling connection among its members; on the other hand, the endeavor to turn the erotic relationship into a contractual one.

  Allan Bloom

  Hands, Erotic, Feelings

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

  10 Copy quote

• The sirens sing sotto voce these days, and the young already have enough wax in their ears to pass them by without danger.

  Allan Bloom

  Ears, Sirens, Enough

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.338, Simon and Schuster

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• Historicism and cultural relativism actually are a means to avoid testing our own prejudices and asking, for example, whether men are really equal or whether that opinion is merely a democratic prejudice.

  Allan Bloom

  Mean, Men, Example

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.40, Simon and Schuster

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• The self must be a tense bow. It must struggle with opposites rather than harmonize them, rather than turn the tension over to the great instruments of last manhood the skilled bow unbenders and Jesuits of our days, the psychiatrists, who, in the same spirit and as part of the same conspiracy of modernity as the peace virtuosos, reduce conflict.

  Allan Bloom

  Struggle, Self, Opposites

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

  7 Copy quote

• [Rock and the intellectual Left] must both be interpreted as parts of the cultural fabric of late capitalism. Their success comes from the bourgeois' need to feel that he is not bourgeois.

  Allan Bloom

  Rocks, Intellectual, Needs

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.78, Simon and Schuster

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• 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 in avoiding death, which is inevitable, and therefore he might be thought to be the most irrational of men, if rationality has anything to do with understanding ends or comprehending the human situation as such.

  Allan Bloom

  Powerful, Passion, Men

  "The Closing of the American Mind: How higher education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today's students". Book by Allan Bloom, 1987.

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• 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 and Homer through Joyce and Proust.

  Allan Bloom

  Men, Literature, Today

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.65, Simon and Schuster

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

  Allan Bloom

  Attachment, Egalitarianism, Degrees

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

  7 Copy quote

• Intellectuals advertise their superiority to political practice but are absolutely in its thrall. It is no accident that Marxist theory and practice use the intellectuals as tools and keep them in brutal subservience.

  Allan Bloom

  Practice, Political, Tools

  "Giants and Dwarfs". Book by Allan Bloom. Chapter: "Commerce and Culture," p. 281, 1990.

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• 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

  Communication, Greek, Special

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.69, Simon and Schuster

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• 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 had to wait for until they grew up and would understand later.

  Allan Bloom

  Music, Children, Silver Platter

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.73, Simon and Schuster

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• 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 Rousseau's criticism of them... Nature is raw material, worthless without the mixture of human labor; yet nature is also the highest and most sacred thing. The same people who struggle to save the snail-darter bless the pill, worry about hunting deer and defend abortion. Reverence for nature, mastery of nature- whichever is convenient.

  Allan Bloom

  Struggle, Hunting, Views

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

  Allan Bloom

  Civilization, Ignorant, Shepherds

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

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• The first discipline modernity's originators imposed upon themselves was that of self-restraint, learning to live with vulgarity. Their high expectations for effectiveness were made possible by low expectations of what was to be.

  Allan Bloom

  Self, Effectiveness, Expectations

  "Giants and Dwarfs". Book by Allan Bloom. Chapter: "Commerce and Culture," p. 285, 1990.

  5 Copy quote

• Locke had illegitimately selected those parts of man he needed for his social contract and suppressed all the rest, a theoretically unsatisfactory procedure and a practically costly one. The bourgeois is the measure of the price paid, he who most of all cannot afford to look to his real self, who denies the existence of the thinly boarded-over basement in him, who is most made over for the purposes of a society that does not even promise him perfection or salvation but merely buys him off.

  Allan Bloom

  Real, Men, Self

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.177, Simon and Schuster

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• The students [of the 60's] substituted conspicuous compassion for their parents' conspicuous consumption.

  Allan Bloom

  Compassion, Parent, Students

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

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• Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts.

  Allan Bloom

  Mind, Liberty, Alternatives

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• Bacon, Locke, Descartes, Hume, and all the others knew they were giving rights to vulgarity. But in so doing in addition to caring for man's well-being they were providing rights for themselves.

  Allan Bloom

  Caring, Men, Rights

  "Giants and Dwarfs". Book by Allan Bloom. Chapter: "Commerce and Culture," p. 289, 1990.

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• 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 improbable and nothing but an imitation of God's, exercises a strange attraction.

  Allan Bloom

  Creativity, Exercise, Men

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.182, Simon and Schuster

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• Openness, as currently conceived, is a way of making surrender to whatever is most powerful, or worship of vulgar success, look principled.

  Allan Bloom

  Powerful, Looks, Way

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.41, Simon and Schuster

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

  Allan Bloom

  Animal, Conservative, Outlook

  "Allan Bloom, 20 years later" by Jim Sleeper, www.theguardian.com. September 17, 2007.

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• 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 the university, and I bless a society that tolerates and supports an eternal childhood for some, a childhood whose playfulness can in turn be a blessing to society.

  Allan Bloom

  Blessing, Thinking, Support

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

  4 Copy quote

• 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 like a refugee camp where all the geniuses driven out of their jobs and countries by unfriendly regimes are idling.

  Allan Bloom

  Country, Jobs, Eye

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• Only when the true ends of society have nothing to do with the sublime does "culture" become necessary as a veneer to cover over the void. Culture can at best appreciate the monuments of earlier faith; it cannot produce them.

  Allan Bloom

  Appreciate, Sublime, Doe

  "Giants and Dwarfs". Book by Allan Bloom. Chapter: "Commerce and Culture," p. 280, 1990.

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• 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 should be.

  Allan Bloom

  Children, Pleasure, Instinct

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.80, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

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