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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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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
Commitment
Signify
Moral
Modernity
Word
Motives
Soul
Dedication
Real
Invented
Motive
Abstract
Absence

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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.
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The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.
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The substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for.
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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.
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It may well be that a societys greatest madness seems normal to itself.
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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.
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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 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.
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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.
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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.
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An education, other than purely professional or technical, can even seem to be an impediment.
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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.
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Rock gives children, on a silver platter, with all the public authority of the entertainment industry, everything their parents always used to tell them they had to wait for until they grew up and would understand later.
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Various kinds of self-forgetting, usually accompanied by illusions and myths, make it possible to live without the intransigent facing of death-in the sense of always thinking about it and what it means for life and the things dear in life-which is characteristic of a serious life.
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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.
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Law may prescribe that the male nipples be made equal to the female ones, but they still will not give milk.
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[A]ny notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as men's taste and capacity to live it, had disappeared. Leisure became entertainment.
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The sirens sing sotto voce these days, and the young already have enough wax in their ears to pass them by without danger.
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Education is the movement from darkness to light.
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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.
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