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Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion.

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
Establish
Illusion
Belief
Values
Cannot
Reason
Stupidest
Pernicious

More quotes by 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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Education is the movement from darkness to light.
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
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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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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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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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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 self is the modern substitute for the soul.
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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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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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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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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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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Authentic values are those by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts.
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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Socrates' way of life is the consequence of his recognition that we can know what it is that we do not know about the most important things and that we are by nature obliged to seek that knowledge.
Allan Bloom
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Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts.
Allan Bloom
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Social science and humanities ... have a mutual contempt for one another, the former looking down on the latter as unscientific, the latter regarding the former as philistine. ... The difference comes down to the fact that social science really wants to be predictive, meaning that man is predictable, while the humanities say that he is not.
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
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The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.
Allan Bloom