145 Quotes by Allan Bloom

Human nature must not be altered in order to have a problem-free world. Man is not just a problem-solving being, as behaviorists would wish us to believe, but a problem-recognizing and -accepting being.

Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts.

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.

There is no real education that does not respond to felt need; anything else acquired is trifling display.

Education is not the taming or domestication of the soul's raw passions - not suppressing them or excising them, which would deprive the soul of its energy - but forming and informing them as art....

This nation's impulse is toward the future, and tradition seems more of a shackle to it than an inspiration.

The substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for.

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.

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.