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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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Culture
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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.
-Allan Bloom
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Education
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The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.
-Allan Bloom
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The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.
-Allan Bloom
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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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Reading
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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.
-Allan Bloom
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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