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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.

— Allan Bloom

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More quotes by Allan Bloom

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)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Allan Bloom (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.