145 Quotes by Allan Bloom

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.

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.

The artist is the most interesting of all phenomena, for he represents creativity, the definition of man.

There are great industries of psychotherapy that address our difficulties in 'relationships' -- that pallid, pseudoscientific word the very timidity of which makes substantial attachments impossible. One has to have a tin ear to describe one's great love as a relationship.

What a people bows before tell us what it is

The most striking fact about contemporary university students is that there is no longer any canon of books which forms their taste and imagination... This state of affairs itself reflects the deeper fact of the decay of the common understanding of – and agreement on – first principles that is characteristic of our times.

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.

Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason’s power.

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.