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We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished.

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
Civilization
Living
Great
Flourished
Like
Civilizations
Shepherds
Fragments
Site
Ignorant

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The sirens sing sotto voce these days, and the young already have enough wax in their ears to pass them by without danger.
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A serious life means being fully aware of the alternatives, thinking about them with all the intensity one brings to bear on life-and-death questions, in full recognition that every choice is a great risk with necessary consequences that are hard to bear.
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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.
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Professors of Greek forget or are unaware that Thomas Aquinas, who did not know Greek, was a better interpreter of Aristotle than any of them have proved to be, not only because he was smarter but because he took Aristotle more seriously.
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The self is the modern substitute for the soul.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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University convention submerges nature. It issues licenses, and hunting without one is forbidden.
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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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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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Classical music is a special taste like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand.
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Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment.
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.
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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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[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.
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Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labor, that he was ignorant. Now every high-school student knows that. How did it become so easy?
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Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.
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