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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.

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
Upon
Imposed
Live
Restraint
Firsts
Lows
Self
Expectations
First
Discipline
Originators
Made
Learning
Vulgarity
Possible
Modernity
High
Effectiveness

More quotes by Allan Bloom

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All literature up to today is sexist. The Muses never sang to the poets about liberated women. It's the same old chanson from the Bible and Homer through Joyce and Proust.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Self-interest is hostile to the common good, but enlightened self-interest is not. And this is the best key to the meaning of enlightenment.
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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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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Classical music is a special taste like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand.
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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.
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Nietzsche said the newspaper had replaced the prayer in the life of the modern bourgeois , meaning that the busy, the cheap, the ephemeral, had usurped all that remained of the eternal in his daily life.
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Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labor, that he was ignorant. Now every high-school student knows that. How did it become so easy?
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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I am not a conservative — neo or paleo. Conservatism is a respectable outlook... I just do not happen to be that animal.
Allan Bloom
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Every age is blind to its own worst madness.
Allan Bloom
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Historicism and cultural relativism actually are a means to avoid testing our own prejudices and asking, for example, whether men are really equal or whether that opinion is merely a democratic prejudice.
Allan Bloom
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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.
Allan Bloom
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The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is.
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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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.
Allan Bloom
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It was not necessarily the best of times in America when Catholics and Protestants were suspicious of and hated one another but at least they were taking their beliefs seriously, and the more or less satisfactory accommodations they worked out were not simply the result of apathy about the state of their souls.
Allan Bloom