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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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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
Beautiful
Pops
Part
Ignorant
Play
Surface
Flourished
Great
Notion
Civilizations
Like
Structure
Shepherds
Civilization
Structures
Living
Fragments
Culture
Site

More quotes by 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.
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The expectation of substantive unity between natural science and social science has faded.... Gone is the cosmic intention of placing man in the universe.
Allan Bloom
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This nation's impulse is toward the future, and tradition seems more of a shackle to it than an inspiration.
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The substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for.
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Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to seek that completion.
Allan Bloom
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There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.
Allan Bloom
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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
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The importance of these [college] years for an American cannot be overestimated. They are civilization's only chance to get to him.
Allan Bloom
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The facile economic and psychological debunking of the theoretical life cannot do away with its irreducible beauties.
Allan Bloom
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A serious life means being fully aware of the alternatives, thinking about them with all the intensity one brings to bear on life-and-death questions, in full recognition that every choice is a great risk with necessary consequences that are hard to bear.
Allan Bloom
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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
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These sociologists who talk to facilely about the sacred are like a man who keeps a toothless old circus lion around the house in order to experience the thrills of the jungle.
Allan Bloom
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Every age is blind to its own worst madness.
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
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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
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Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it.
Allan Bloom
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There is a perennial and unobtrusive view that morality consists in such things as telling the truth, paying one's debts, respecting one's parents and doing no voluntary harm to anyone. Those are all things easy to say and hard to do they do not attract much attention, and win little honor in the world.
Allan Bloom
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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
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It is easy today to deny God's creativity as a thing of the benighted past, overcome by science, but man's creativity, a thing much more improbable and nothing but an imitation of God's, exercises a strange attraction.
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