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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

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Allan Bloom
Age: 62 †
Born: 1930
Born: September 14
Died: 1992
Died: October 7
Classical Scholar
Journalist
Philosopher
Political Scientist
Indianapolis
Indiana
Allan David Bloom
Might
Wise
Specialized
Children
Imagine
Competence
Success
Parenting
Idea
Aspiration
Father
Fathers
Lost
Mothers
Mother
Inspiring
Ideas
Highest

More quotes by Allan Bloom

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Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.
Allan Bloom
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University convention submerges nature. It issues licenses, and hunting without one is forbidden.
Allan Bloom
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All literature up to today is sexist. The Muses never sang to the poets about liberated women. It's the same old chanson from the Bible and Homer through Joyce and Proust.
Allan Bloom
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The distinction between private and public undermines the unity of spiritual strength, draining the public of the transcendent energies while trivializing them because the merely private life provides no proper stage for their action.
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We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished.
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The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.
Allan Bloom
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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
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There is no real teacher who in practise does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech.
Allan Bloom
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Never did I think that the university was properly ministerial to the society around it. Rather I thought and think that society is ministerial to the university, and I bless a society that tolerates and supports an eternal childhood for some, a childhood whose playfulness can in turn be a blessing to society.
Allan Bloom
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[Rock and the intellectual Left] must both be interpreted as parts of the cultural fabric of late capitalism. Their success comes from the bourgeois' need to feel that he is not bourgeois.
Allan Bloom
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It was not necessarily the best of times in America when Catholics and Protestants were suspicious of and hated one another but at least they were taking their beliefs seriously, and the more or less satisfactory accommodations they worked out were not simply the result of apathy about the state of their souls.
Allan Bloom
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I am not a conservative — neo or paleo. Conservatism is a respectable outlook... I just do not happen to be that animal.
Allan Bloom
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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.
Allan Bloom
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There is no real education that does not respond to felt need anything else acquired is trifling display.
Allan Bloom
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An education, other than purely professional or technical, can even seem to be an impediment.
Allan Bloom
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A new language always reflects a new point of view, and the gradual unconscious popularization of new words, or of old words used in new ways, is a sure sign of a profound change in people's articulation of the world.
Allan Bloom
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We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.
Allan Bloom
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Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts.
Allan Bloom
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Education is not the taming or domestication of the soul's raw passions - not suppressing them or excising them, which would deprive the soul of its energy - but forming and informing them as art.
Allan Bloom
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Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication.
Allan Bloom