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Allan Bloom Quotes
1930–1992 United States
Allan David Bloom (14 September, 1930 in Indianapolis, Indiana – 7 October, 1992 in Chicago, Illinois) was an American philosopher, essayist and academic. Bloom championed education based on the study of 'Great Books', as did his mentor Leo Strauss.
United States Academics Educators Essayists Historians Also known as: Allan David Bloom, Bloom, Allan
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43 quotes
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.
Their high expectations for effectiveness were made possible by low expectations of what was to be.
The academies and universities satisfied Socrates’ demand to be fed in the prytaneum.
Education is the taming or domestication of the soul’s raw passions—not suppressing or excising them, which would deprive the soul of its energy—but forming and informing them as art.
The university ... must be contemptuous of public opinion because it has within it the source of autonomy—the quest for and even discovery of the truth according to nature.
The Closing of the American Mind (1987)
Bacon, Locke, Descartes, Hume, and all the others knew they were giving rights to vulgarity. But in so doing—in addition to caring for man’s well-being—they were providing rights for themselves.
Giants and Dwarfs (1990)
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.
Giants and Dwarfs (1990)
With all regimes, there is what might be called an official interpretation of the past that makes it appear defective or just a step on the way to the present regime.
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.
The distinction between the world of commerce and that of “culture” quickly became the distinction between infrastructure and superstructure, with the former clearly determining the latter.
Giants and Dwarfs (1990)
Honesty compels serious men, on examination of their consciences, to admit that the old faith is no longer compelling. It is the very peak of Christian virtue that demands the sacrifice of Christianity.
Enlightenment presented the thinker not as the best man but as the most useful one. Happiness is the most important thing; if thinking is not happiness, it must be judged by its relationship to happiness.
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.
Giants and Dwarfs (1990)
Socrates’ way of life is the consequence of his recognition that we can know what it is that we do not know about the most important things and that we are by nature obliged to seek that knowledge.
Giants and Dwarfs (1990)
Intellectuals … advertise their superiority to political practice but are absolutely in its thrall. … It is no accident that Marxist theory and practice use the intellectuals as tools and keep them in brutal subservience.
Giants and Dwarfs (1990)
The first discipline modernity’s originators imposed upon themselves was that of self-restraint, learning to live with vulgarity. Their high expectations for effectiveness were made possible by low expectations of what was to be.
Giants and Dwarfs (1990)
Merely methodological excision from the soul of the imagination that projects Gods and heroes onto the wall of the cave does not promote knowledge of the soul; it only lobotomizes it, cripples its powers.
One of the intellectual charms of Marxism is that it explains the injustice or philistinism of the people in such a way as to exculpate the people, who are said to be manipulated by corrupt elites.
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.
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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