Allan Bloom
The way I knew I was right about something was the kids got angry. That's very important: you touch that anger.Collection: Anger
Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise... specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.Collection: Parenting
The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is.Collection: Failure
Education is the movement from darkness to light.Collection: Education
The spirit is at home, if not entirely satisfied, in America.Collection: Home
There is no real teacher who in practice does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech.Collection: Teacher
The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.Collection: Age
As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.
Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidiest and most pernicious illusion.
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.
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.
Shakespeare is practically our only link with the classic and the past. The future of education has much to do with whether we will be able to cling to him or not.
The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.
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.
Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.
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.
Authentic values are those by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts.
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.
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?
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 relative.
Shakespeare did not consider himself the legislator of mankind. He faithfully records man's problems and does not evidently propose to solve them.
Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.
Shakespeare's naturalness is attested to by the strange fact that he is the only classical author who remains popular. The critical termites are massed and eating away at the foundations, trying to topple him. Whether they will succeed will be a test of his robustness.
The longing for Europe has been all but extinguished in the young.
The real community of man is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers.
I never considered myself a writer. I'm a teacher. In a way, I feel kind of... kind of guilty for all the people who are writers who hope to be on the best-seller list someday, who live for that and don't get it, and it came to me as a kind of free gift, like God coming to Abraham and announcing, 'I've chosen you!'
The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.Collection: Successful
To recognize that some of the things our culture believes are not true imposes on us the duty of finding out which are true and which are not.Collection: Believe
Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion.Collection: Belief
Sycophancy toward those who hold power is a fact in every regime, and especially in a democracy, where, unlike tyranny, there is an accepted principle of legitimacy that breaks the inner will to resist.... Flattery of the people and incapacity to resist public opinion are the democratic vices, particularly among writers, artists, journalists and anyone else who is dependent on an audience.Collection: Artist
I am now even more persuaded of the urgent need to study why Socrates was accused. The dislike of philosophy is perennial, and the seeds of the condemnation of Socrates are present at all times, not in the bosoms of pleasure-seekers, who don't give a damn, but in those of high-minded and idealistic persons who do not want to submit their aspirations to examination.Collection: Philosophy
Self-interest is hostile to the common good, but enlightened self-interest is not. And this is the best key to the meaning of enlightenment.Collection: Keys
Every age is blind to its own worst madness.Collection: Age
The self is the modern substitute for the soul.Collection: Self
A good education would be devoted to encouraging and refining the love of the beautiful, but a pathologically misguided moralism instead turns such longing into a sin against the high goal of making everyone feel good, of overcoming nature in the name of equality. ... Love of the beautiful may be the last and finest sacrifice to radical egalitarianism.Collection: Beautiful
Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication.Collection: Real
Law may prescribe that the male nipples be made equal to the female ones, but they still will not give milk.Collection: Law
Education is not the taming or domestication of the soul's raw passions - not suppressing them or excising them, which would deprive the soul of its energy - but forming and informing them as art.Collection: Education
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 full recognition that every choice is a great risk with necessary consequences that are hard to bear.Collection: Mean
The artist is the most interesting of all phenomena, for he represents creativity, the definition of man.Collection: Creativity
Once the law is broken with impunity, each man regains the right to any means he deems proper or necessary in order to defend himself against the new tyrant, the one who can break the law.Collection: Mean
This nation's impulse is toward the future, and tradition seems more of a shackle to it than an inspiration.Collection: Inspiration
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Sex
I am not a conservative — neo or paleo. Conservatism is a respectable outlook... I just do not happen to be that animal.Collection: Animal
The distinction between private and public undermines the unity of spiritual strength, draining the public of the transcendent energies while trivializing them because the merely private life provides no proper stage for their action.Collection: Spiritual
The importance of these [college] years for an American cannot be overestimated. They are civilization's only chance to get to him.Collection: Education
Culture as art is the peak expression of man's creativity, his capacity to break out of nature's narrow bounds, and hence out of the degrading interpretation of man in modern natural and political science.Collection: Art
There is no real teacher who in practise does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech.Collection: Teacher
There are two threats to reason, the opinion that one knows the truth about the most important things and the opinion that there is no truth about them. Both of these opinions are fatal to philosophy; the first asserts that the quest for truth is unnecessary, while the second asserts that it is impossible. The Socratic knowledge of ignorance, which I take to be the beginning point of all philosophy, defines the sensible middle ground between two extremes.Collection: Philosophy