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Quotes from The Closing of the American Mind — Allan Bloom

1930–1992 United States

← All quotes by Allan Bloom

4 quotes

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)

The ancients held that a man must never let himself be overcome by events unless those events taught something essentially new. They were more intent than were any men before or since on preserving the freedom of the mind.

The Closing of the American Mind (1988)

Students have powerful images of what a perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. But deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one.

The Closing of the American Mind (1987)

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.

The Closing of the American Mind (1987)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Allan Bloom (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.