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America
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The spirit is at home, if not entirely satisfied, in America.
-Allan Bloom
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Community
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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.
-Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind
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Education
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"Education is the movement from darkness to light."
-Allan Bloom
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Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to seek that completion.
-Allan Bloom
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Ignorance & Stupidity
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Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labor, that he was ignorant. Now every high-school student knows that. How did it become so easy?
-Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, introduction, 1987
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Laziness
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Any notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as men's taste and capacity to live it, has disappeared. Leisure [has become] entertainment.
-Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, 1987
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Morals
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There is a perennial and unobtrusive view that morality consists in such things as telling the truth, paying one's debts, respecting one's parents and doing no voluntary harm to anyone. Those are all things easy to say and hard to do; they do not attract much attention, and win little honor in the world.
-Allan Bloom
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Music
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Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.
-Allan Bloom
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Parenting
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Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise... specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.
-Allan Bloom
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Prejudice
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Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.
-Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind
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Teaching
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There is no real teacher who in practice does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech.
-Allan Bloom
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Tradition
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As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.
-Allan Bloom, "The Closing of the American Mind," pt. 1, "The Clean Slate," 1987
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Books by and about Allan Bloom
