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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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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
Experience
Thrills
House
Circus
Order
Lion
Around
Jungle
Men
Lions
Like
Keeps
Sacred
Toothless
Talk
Sociologists

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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.
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We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished.
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Most of all I admire Mozart's capacity to be both deep and rational, a combination often said to be impossible.
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Authentic values are those by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts.
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The self is the modern substitute for the soul.
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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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Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication.
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As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.
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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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Did Romeo and Juliet have a ... relationship? The term relationship ... betokens a chaste egalitarianism leveling different ranks and degrees of attachment.
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Socrates' way of life is the consequence of his recognition that we can know what it is that we do not know about the most important things and that we are by nature obliged to seek that knowledge.
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The artist is the most interesting of all phenomena, for he represents creativity, the definition of man.
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Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Social science and humanities ... have a mutual contempt for one another, the former looking down on the latter as unscientific, the latter regarding the former as philistine. ... The difference comes down to the fact that social science really wants to be predictive, meaning that man is predictable, while the humanities say that he is not.
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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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