Allan Bloom quotes

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

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

As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.
- Allan Bloom

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

The real community of man...is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers.
- Allan Bloom

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

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.
- Allan Bloom

“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

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

I have no desire to preach a high-minded and merely edifying version of love.
- Allan Bloom

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

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

Shakespeare did not consider himself the legislator of mankind. He faithfully records man's problems and does not evidently propose to solve them.
- Allan Bloom

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.
- Allan Bloom

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

We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished.
- Allan Bloom

Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise----as priests, prophets or philosophers are wise. Specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.
- Allan Bloom

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

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

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