Allan Bloom Quotes
Allan Bloom presents measured, reflective insights on education, learning, and ignorance that challenge complacent thinking.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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DePauw University News 'Closing of the American Mind Author Allan Bloom Calls on DePauw Students to Seize 'Charmed Years'. Ubben Lecture Series : 11 September 1987, Greencastle, Indiana. (Accessed 16 May 2007).
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Patner, Andrew. Chicago Sun-Times, 'Allan Bloom, warts and all' 16 April 2000. (Accessed 16 May 2007).
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West, Thomas G. The Claremont Institute, The Claremont Institute Blog Writings. 'Allan Bloom and America' 1 June 2000. (Accessed 16 May 2007).
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The students [of the 60's] substituted conspicuous compassion for their parents' conspicuous consumption.
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The students [of the 60s] substituted conspicuous compassion for their parents conspicuous consumption.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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. He gives way without reserve to his most powerful passion and the wishes it engenders.
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The longing for Europe has been all but extinguished in the young.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidiest and most pernicious illusion.
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As Western nations became more prosperous, leisure, which had been put off for several centuries in favor of the pursuit of property, the means to leisure, finally began to be of primary concern. But, in the meantime, any notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as men's taste and capacity to live it, had disappeared.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.