Allan Bloom quotes

Allan Bloom was an American philosopher, classicist, and academic, well known for his critique of contemporary education. His book "The Closing of the American Mind" became a major bestseller and influenced debates on culture and higher education. He remains recognized for his insights into philosophy, literature, and the role of universities in society. Here are 44 of his quotes:

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency -- the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Allan Bloom

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.

Allan Bloom

A good education would be devoted to encouraging and refining the love of the beautiful, but a pathologically misguided moralism instead turns such longing into a sin against the high goal of making everyone feel good, of overcoming nature in the name of equality. ... Love of the beautiful may be the last and finest sacrifice to radical egalitarianism.

Allan Bloom

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.

Allan Bloom

The de-eroticization of the world, a companion to its disenchantment ... seems to result from a combination of causes our democratic regime and its tendencies toward leveling and self-protection, a reductionist-materialist science that inevitably interprets eros as sex, and the atmosphere generated by "the death of God" and of the subordinate god, Eros.

Allan Bloom

The old view was that delicacy of language was part of the nature, the sacred nature, of eros and that to speak about it in any other way would be to misunderstand it. What has disappeared is the risk and the hope of human connectedness embedded in eros. Ours is a language that reduces the longing for an other to the need for individual, private satisfaction and safety.

Allan Bloom

Plato says a multitude can never philosophize and hence can never recognize the seriousness of philosophy or who really philosophizes. Attempting to influence the multitude results in forced prostitution.

Allan Bloom

We witness a strange inversion: on the one hand, the endeavor to turn the social contract into a less calculating and more feeling connection among its members; on the other hand, the endeavor to turn the erotic relationship into a contractual one.

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

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

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.

Allan Bloom

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Allan Bloom

Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.

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... specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.

Allan Bloom

Adeimantus, in what amounts to an accusation of Socrates, asserts that the philosophers appear to be either useless or vicious. Plato, as I have suggested, teaches that ultimately this is an appearance that cannot be reversed, and this insures the philosophers' permanent marginality. They appear as useless because they are. They are neither artisans, nor statesmen, nor rhetoricians. They are idlers who contribute nothing to security or posterity. Their peculiar contemplative pleasures are not accessible to the majority of mankind, and they do not provide for the popular pleasures as do the poets.

Allan Bloom

In the new order a Locke was free-with almost no danger of being interfered with-to think his sublime thoughts, to seek the first causes of all things, to understand the nature of things. He could talk with his friends and teach the young. And there was money enough. The academies and universities satisfied Socrates' demand to be fed in the prytaneum.

Allan Bloom

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.

Allan Bloom

As to the viciousness of the philosophers, the meaning of this complaint is succinctly expressed in the charge that the philosophers do not "hold the gods the city holds.” And this accusation is most true. The quest for wisdom begins in doubt of the conventional wisdom about the highest things. The most cherished beliefs of the community, the collective hopes and fears, are centered on its gods. The unpardonable thing is to be beyond these hopes and fears, beyond the awe and shame the gods impose.

Allan Bloom