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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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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
Passions
Education
Passion
Domestication
Energy
Taming
Art
Informing
Soul
Suppressing
Would
Deprive
Forming

More quotes by Allan Bloom

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This nation's impulse is toward the future, and tradition seems more of a shackle to it than an inspiration.
Allan Bloom
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The spirit is at home, if not entirely satisfied, in America.
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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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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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We witness a strange inversion: on the one hand, the endeavor to turn the social contract into a less calculating and more feeling connection among its members on the other hand, the endeavor to turn the erotic relationship into a contractual one.
Allan Bloom
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An education, other than purely professional or technical, can even seem to be an impediment.
Allan Bloom
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The facile economic and psychological debunking of the theoretical life cannot do away with its irreducible beauties.
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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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The substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for.
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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.
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We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished.
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Openness, as currently conceived, is a way of making surrender to whatever is most powerful, or worship of vulgar success, look principled.
Allan Bloom
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Children tend to be rather better observers of adults' characters than adults are of children's, because children are so dependent on adults that it is very much in their interest to discover the weaknesses of their elders.
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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It may well be that a societys greatest madness seems normal to itself.
Allan Bloom
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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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Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.
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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Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion.
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