145 Quotes by Allan Bloom

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

Music, as everyone experiences, provides an unquestionable justification and a fulfilling pleasure for the activities it accompanies: the soldier who hears the marching band is enthralled and reassured; the religious man is exalted in his prayer by the sound of the organ in the church; and the lover is carried away and his conscience stilled by the romantic guitar. Armed with music, man can damn rational doubt.

But nowhere is this a more urgent task than in matters of eros, the first and best hope of human connectedness in a world where all connectedness has become problematic.

Contrary to what is commonly thought, without the book even the idea of the order of the whole is lost.

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.

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.

What poor substitutes for real diversity are the wild rainbows of dyed hair and other external differences that tell the observer nothing about what is inside.

The end result is that there can be no more truth or goodness and no need or even ability to make tough choices. Where the purpose of higher education once was to enable the student to find truth, the modern university teaches that there is no truth, only ’lifestyle.

Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise – -as priests, prophets or philosophers are wise. Specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.