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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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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
Relationship
Leveling
Term
Egalitarianism
Different
Romeo
Chaste
Juliet
Ranks
Attachment
Degrees

More quotes by 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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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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The facile economic and psychological debunking of the theoretical life cannot do away with its irreducible beauties.
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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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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Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication.
Allan Bloom
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[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
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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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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 most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.
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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To recognize that some of the things our culture believes are not true imposes on us the duty of finding out which are true and which are not.
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.
Allan Bloom
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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
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The spirit is at home, if not entirely satisfied, in America.
Allan Bloom
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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.
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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We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished.
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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Children tend to be rather better observers of adults' characters than adults are of children's, because children are so dependent on adults that it is very much in their interest to discover the weaknesses of their elders.
Allan Bloom