Allan Bloom quotes - page 2

The highest activities are always essentially lonely and private, and these men had a robust sense of their independence and the ultimate self-sufficiency of the mind. In this they were just like Socrates. The only change they operated was to bring philosophy out of the closet into the open, instead of seeking protection behind a little wall like men in a storm. Of course, in so doing they made philosophy, on the one hand, more vulnerable to the public if the hopes of controlling the public are not fulfilled, and, on the other, put at risk that inner intransigence which is the necessary condition of the quest for truth. Not only the rewards but the new responsibilities might prove irresistible temptations to compromise. (Allan Bloom)
There are two kinds of openness, the openness of indifference-promoted with the twin purposes of humbling our intellectual pride and letting us be whatever we want to be, just as long as we don't want to be knowers-and the openness that invites us to the quest for knowledge and certitude, for which history and the various cultures provide a brilliant array of examples for examination. View quote
Allan Bloom
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. View quote
Allan Bloom
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. View quote
Allan Bloom
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. View quote
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. View quote
Allan Bloom
As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead. View quote
Allan Bloom
Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music. View quote
Allan Bloom
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. View quote
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. View quote
Allan Bloom
The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself. (Allan Bloom)
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. View quote
Allan Bloom
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? View quote
Allan Bloom
The spirit is at home, if not entirely satisfied, in America. View quote
Allan Bloom
See also The Closing of the American Mind. View quote
Allan Bloom
Only the search back to the origins of one's ideas in order to see the real arguments for them, before people became so certain of them that they ceased thinking about them at all, can liberate us. View quote
Allan Bloom
The dislike of philosophy is perennial, and the seeds of the condemnation of Socrates are present at all times. View quote
Allan Bloom
Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidiest and most pernicious illusion. View quote
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. View quote
Allan Bloom