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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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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
College
Education
Chance
American
Cannot
Years
Overestimated
Importance
Civilization

More quotes by Allan Bloom

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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.
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
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[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
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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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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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The artist is the most interesting of all phenomena, for he represents creativity, the definition of man.
Allan Bloom
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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
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It was not necessarily the best of times in America when Catholics and Protestants were suspicious of and hated one another but at least they were taking their beliefs seriously, and the more or less satisfactory accommodations they worked out were not simply the result of apathy about the state of their souls.
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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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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The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.
Allan Bloom
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The facile economic and psychological debunking of the theoretical life cannot do away with its irreducible beauties.
Allan Bloom
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The humanities are like the great old Paris Flea Market where, amidst masses of junk, people with a good eye found cast away treasures...They are like a refugee camp where all the geniuses driven out of their jobs and countries by unfriendly regimes are idling.
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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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.
Allan Bloom
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The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.
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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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.
Allan Bloom
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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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Most of all I admire Mozart's capacity to be both deep and rational, a combination often said to be impossible.
Allan Bloom