Quote

The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.

Allan Bloom

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Function
Protect
Age
Reason
Important
University

More quotes by Allan Bloom

Image
The sirens sing sotto voce these days, and the young already have enough wax in their ears to pass them by without danger.
Allan Bloom
Image
Human nature must not be altered in order to have a problem-free world. Man is not just a problem-solving being, as behaviorists would wish us to believe, but a problem-recognizing and -accepting being.
Allan Bloom
Image
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
Image
It may well be that a societys greatest madness seems normal to itself.
Allan Bloom
Image
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
Image
As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.
Allan Bloom
Image
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
Image
Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion.
Allan Bloom
Image
Every age is blind to its own worst madness.
Allan Bloom
Image
I am not a conservative — neo or paleo. Conservatism is a respectable outlook... I just do not happen to be that animal.
Allan Bloom
Image
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
Image
There is no real education that does not respond to felt need anything else acquired is trifling display.
Allan Bloom
Image
Law may prescribe that the male nipples be made equal to the female ones, but they still will not give milk.
Allan Bloom
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labor, that he was ignorant. Now every high-school student knows that. How did it become so easy?
Allan Bloom
Image
The students [of the 60's] substituted conspicuous compassion for their parents' conspicuous consumption.
Allan Bloom
Image
Authentic values are those by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts.
Allan Bloom
Image
Nietzsche said the newspaper had replaced the prayer in the life of the modern bourgeois , meaning that the busy, the cheap, the ephemeral, had usurped all that remained of the eternal in his daily life.
Allan Bloom
Image
Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts.
Allan Bloom