145 Quotes by Allan Bloom

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

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

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

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

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

The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth.

The self must be a tense bow. It must struggle with opposites rather than harmonize them, rather than turn the tension over to the great instruments of last manhood the skilled bow unbenders and Jesuits of our days, the psychiatrists, who, in the same spirit and as part of the same conspiracy of modernity as the peace virtuosos, reduce conflict.

The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contraditory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth, of potential knowers... of all men to the extent that they know.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of property were just what Aristotle did not talk about. They are the conditions of happiness; but the essence of happiness, according to Aristotle, is virtue. So the moderns decided to deal with the conditions and to let happiness take care of itself.