145 Quotes by Allan Bloom

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.

I simply try to act as an honest broker for greater persons and writers than I am... I present no theory, nor do I have one... I have constructed no Schema... in terms of the struggle between Eros and agape and the futility of the former in the face of the latter. I have no aspirations, hoping only to show you what some great writers thought these things are.

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.

I have no desire... to preach a high-minded and merely edifying version of love.

Without the great revelations, epics and philosophies as part of our natural vision, there is nothing to see out there, and eventually little left inside.

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.

A new language always reflects a new point of view, and the gradual unconscious popularization of new words, or of old words used in new ways, is a sure sign of a profound change in people’s articulation of the world.

In us the contempt for the heroic is only an extension of the perversion of the democratic principle that denies greatness and wants everyone to feel comfortable in his skin without having to suffer unpleasant comparisons.

Here’s a real man!” I said. “It’s been pretty transparent all along that other people’s opinions about these things wouldn’t be enough for you.