Allan Bloom

“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.”

“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.”

“The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.”

“Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication.”

“Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.”

“Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.”

“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.”

“Authentic values are those by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts.”

“As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.”

“The way I knew I was right about something was the kids got angry. That's very important: you touch that anger.”

“Our Nation, a great stage for the acting out of great thoughts, presents the classic confrontation between Locke's views of the state of nature and Rousseau's criticism of them... Nature is raw material, worthless without the mixture of human labor; yet nature is also the highest and most sacred thing. The same people who struggle to save the snail-darter bless the pill, worry about hunting deer and defend abortion. Reverence for nature, mastery of nature- whichever is convenient.”

“The real community of man is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers.”

“I never considered myself a writer. I'm a teacher. In a way, I feel kind of... kind of guilty for all the people who are writers who hope to be on the best-seller list someday, who live for that and don't get it, and it came to me as a kind of free gift, like God coming to Abraham and announcing, 'I've chosen you!'”

“The longing for Europe has been all but extinguished in the young.”

“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?”

“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.”

“Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise... specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.”

“Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidiest and most pernicious illusion.”

“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.”

“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.”