Allan Bloom Quotes

Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise----as priests, prophets or philosophers are wise. Specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.

True openness is the accompaniment of the desire to know, hence of the awareness of ignorance. To deny the possibility of knowing good and bad is to suppress true openness.

Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication.

Our Nation, a great stage for the acting out of great thoughts, presents the classic confrontation between Locke's views of the state of nature and Rousseau's criticism of them... Nature is raw material, worthless without the mixture of human labor; yet nature is also the highest and most sacred thing. The same people who struggle to save the snail-darter bless the pill, worry about hunting deer and defend abortion. Reverence for nature, mastery of nature- whichever is convenient.

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.

Education is the movement from darkness to light

Education is the movement from darkness to light.

Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment.