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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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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
Example
Testing
Opinion
Cultural
Actually
Prejudice
Whether
Avoid
Means
Merely
Mean
Democratic
Really
Asking
Relativism
Men
Equal
Prejudices

More quotes by Allan Bloom

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Culture as art is the peak expression of man's creativity, his capacity to break out of nature's narrow bounds, and hence out of the degrading interpretation of man in modern natural and political science.
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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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Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to seek that completion.
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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.
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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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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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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 spirit is at home, if not entirely satisfied, in America.
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Education is the movement from darkness to light.
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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.
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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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The students [of the 60's] substituted conspicuous compassion for their parents' conspicuous consumption.
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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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.
Allan Bloom
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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.
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 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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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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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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Law may prescribe that the male nipples be made equal to the female ones, but they still will not give milk.
Allan Bloom