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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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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
Needs
Alive
Make
Happened
Possible
Future
History
Tell
Past
Need
Explain

More quotes by Allan Bloom

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Law may prescribe that the male nipples be made equal to the female ones, but they still will not give milk.
Allan Bloom
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Education is the movement from darkness to light.
Allan Bloom
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Did Romeo and Juliet have a ... relationship? The term relationship ... betokens a chaste egalitarianism leveling different ranks and degrees of attachment.
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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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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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.
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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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 may well be that a societys greatest madness seems normal to itself.
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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Only when the true ends of society have nothing to do with the sublime does culture become necessary as a veneer to cover over the void. Culture can at best appreciate the monuments of earlier faith it cannot produce them.
Allan Bloom
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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.
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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Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.
Allan Bloom
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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
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The students [of the 60's] substituted conspicuous compassion for their parents' conspicuous consumption.
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 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
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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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Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion.
Allan Bloom