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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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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
Men
Necessary
Broken
Regains
Break
Deems
Law
Impunity
Means
Tyrant
Order
Tyrants
Right
Defend
Mean
Proper

More quotes by 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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There is no real teacher who in practise does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech.
Allan Bloom
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The spirit is at home, if not entirely satisfied, in America.
Allan Bloom
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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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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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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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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.
Allan Bloom
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Bacon, Locke, Descartes, Hume, and all the others knew they were giving rights to vulgarity. But in so doing in addition to caring for man's well-being they were providing rights for themselves.
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
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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.
Allan Bloom
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University convention submerges nature. It issues licenses, and hunting without one is forbidden.
Allan Bloom
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The substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for.
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
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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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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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The artist is the most interesting of all phenomena, for he represents creativity, the definition of man.
Allan Bloom
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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.
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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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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Authentic values are those by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts.
Allan Bloom