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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
Like
Civilizations
Shepherds
Fragments
Site
Ignorant
Civilization
Living
Great
Flourished

More quotes by 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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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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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
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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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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
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Various kinds of self-forgetting, usually accompanied by illusions and myths, make it possible to live without the intransigent facing of death-in the sense of always thinking about it and what it means for life and the things dear in life-which is characteristic of a serious life.
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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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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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
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There is no real education that does not respond to felt need anything else acquired is trifling display.
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 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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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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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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[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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There is a perennial and unobtrusive view that morality consists in such things as telling the truth, paying one's debts, respecting one's parents and doing no voluntary harm to anyone. Those are all things easy to say and hard to do they do not attract much attention, and win little honor in the world.
Allan Bloom
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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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Education is the movement from darkness to light.
Allan Bloom
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As Western nations became more prosperous, leisure, which had been put off for several centuries in favor of the pursuit of property, the means to leisure, finally began to be of primary concern. But, in the meantime, any notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as men's taste and capacity to live it, had disappeared.
Allan Bloom
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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.
Allan Bloom