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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.
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
Believe
Speech
Teaching
Magic
Teacher
Existence
Doe
Practise
Soul
Retirement
Real
Acts
More quotes by Allan Bloom
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
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
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
Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion.
Allan Bloom
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
A new language always reflects a new point of view, and the gradual unconscious popularization of new words, or of old words used in new ways, is a sure sign of a profound change in people's articulation of the world.
Allan Bloom
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
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
[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.
Allan Bloom
Most of all I admire Mozart's capacity to be both deep and rational, a combination often said to be impossible.
Allan Bloom
The substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for.
Allan Bloom
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
University convention submerges nature. It issues licenses, and hunting without one is forbidden.
Allan Bloom
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
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
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
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
Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts.
Allan Bloom
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
The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.
Allan Bloom