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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

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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
Quickly
Superstructure
Became
Determining
Culture
Infrastructure
World
Commerce
Distinction
Latter
Former
Clearly

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The distinction between private and public undermines the unity of spiritual strength, draining the public of the transcendent energies while trivializing them because the merely private life provides no proper stage for their action.
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The facile economic and psychological debunking of the theoretical life cannot do away with its irreducible beauties.
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Once the law is broken with impunity, each man regains the right to any means he deems proper or necessary in order to defend himself against the new tyrant, the one who can break the law.
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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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There is no real education that does not respond to felt need anything else acquired is trifling display.
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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.
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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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It is easy today to deny God's creativity as a thing of the benighted past, overcome by science, but man's creativity, a thing much more improbable and nothing but an imitation of God's, exercises a strange attraction.
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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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Rock gives children, on a silver platter, with all the public authority of the entertainment industry, everything their parents always used to tell them they had to wait for until they grew up and would understand later.
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An education, other than purely professional or technical, can even seem to be an impediment.
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University convention submerges nature. It issues licenses, and hunting without one is forbidden.
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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.
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Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.
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The first discipline modernity's originators imposed upon themselves was that of self-restraint, learning to live with vulgarity. Their high expectations for effectiveness were made possible by low expectations of what was to be.
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Life, liberty, and the pursuit of property were just what Aristotle did not talk about. They are the conditions of happiness but the essence of happiness, according to Aristotle, is virtue. So the moderns decided to deal with the conditions and to let happiness take care of itself.
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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.
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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.
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Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment.
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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.
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