Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Openness, as currently conceived, is a way of making surrender to whatever is most powerful, or worship of vulgar success, look principled.
Allan Bloom
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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
Whatever
Principled
Success
Conceived
Making
Currently
Look
Openness
Looks
Vulgar
Way
Surrender
Worship
Powerful
More quotes by Allan Bloom
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
Law may prescribe that the male nipples be made equal to the female ones, but they still will not give milk.
Allan Bloom
Plato says a multitude can never philosophize and hence can never recognize the seriousness of philosophy or who really philosophizes. Attempting to influence the multitude results in forced prostitution.
Allan Bloom
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
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
Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it.
Allan Bloom
It may well be that a societys greatest madness seems normal to itself.
Allan Bloom
The self is the modern substitute for the soul.
Allan Bloom
Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment.
Allan Bloom
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
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
Most of all I admire Mozart's capacity to be both deep and rational, a combination often said to be impossible.
Allan Bloom
Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion.
Allan Bloom
The distinction between the world of commerce and that of culture quickly became the distinction between infrastructure and superstructure, with the former clearly determining the latter.
Allan Bloom
Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts.
Allan Bloom
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
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
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
[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
Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.
Allan Bloom
