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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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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
Education
Pleasure
Natural
Feel
Continuity
Feels
Instincts
Children
Pleasures
Providing
Instinct

More quotes by Allan Bloom

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The self must be a tense bow. It must struggle with opposites rather than harmonize them, rather than turn the tension over to the great instruments of last manhood the skilled bow unbenders and Jesuits of our days, the psychiatrists, who, in the same spirit and as part of the same conspiracy of modernity as the peace virtuosos, reduce conflict.
Allan Bloom
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Education is the movement from darkness to light.
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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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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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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University convention submerges nature. It issues licenses, and hunting without one is forbidden.
Allan Bloom
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We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished.
Allan Bloom
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Self-interest is hostile to the common good, but enlightened self-interest is not. And this is the best key to the meaning of enlightenment.
Allan Bloom
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It may well be that a societys greatest madness seems normal to itself.
Allan Bloom
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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
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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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The students [of the 60's] substituted conspicuous compassion for their parents' conspicuous consumption.
Allan Bloom
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Intellectuals advertise their superiority to political practice but are absolutely in its thrall. It is no accident that Marxist theory and practice use the intellectuals as tools and keep them in brutal subservience.
Allan Bloom
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Classical music is a special taste like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand.
Allan Bloom
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Historicism and cultural relativism actually are a means to avoid testing our own prejudices and asking, for example, whether men are really equal or whether that opinion is merely a democratic prejudice.
Allan Bloom
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We need history, not to tell us what happened or to explain the past, but to make the past alive so that it can explain us and make a future possible.
Allan Bloom
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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.
Allan Bloom
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Culture as art is the peak expression of man's creativity, his capacity to break out of nature's narrow bounds, and hence out of the degrading interpretation of man in modern natural and political science.
Allan Bloom
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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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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