Allan Bloom Quotes - Page 2

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• 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 surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.

  Allan Bloom

  Beautiful, Civilization, Play

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

  7 Copy quote

• 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 have proved to be, not only because he was smarter but because he took Aristotle more seriously.

  Allan Bloom

  Greek, Philosopher, Forget

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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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• Children tend to be rather better observers of adults' characters than adults are of children's, because children are so dependent on adults that it is very much in their interest to discover the weaknesses of their elders.

  Allan Bloom

  Children, Character, Weakness

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.315, Simon and Schuster

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• In America we have only the bourgeoisie, and the love of the heroic is one of the few counterpoises available to us. In us the contempt for the heroic is only an extension of the perversion of the democratic principle that denies greatness and wants everyone to feel comfortable in his skin without having to suffer unpleasant comparisons. Students have not the slightest notion of what an achievement it is to free oneself from public guidance and find resources for guidance within oneself.

  Allan Bloom

  Greatness, America, Achievement

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.66, Simon and Schuster

  15 Copy quote

• 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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• 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”

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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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• 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

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

• 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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• 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.

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  7 Copy quote

• 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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• 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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• 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”

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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

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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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• [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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• 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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