In America we have only the bourgeoisie, and the love of the heroic is one of the few counterpoises available to us. 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. Students have not the slightest notion of what an achievement it is to free oneself from public guidance and find resources for guidance within oneself.

Allan Bloom

Categorized in : America Greatness Achievement

Education is the movement from darkness to light.

Allan Bloom

light education inspirational

The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.

Allan Bloom

awareness-of-others political successful

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

Allan Bloom

illusion belief reason

The artist is the most interesting of all phenomena, for he represents creativity, the definition of man.

Allan Bloom

creativity artist men

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

education inspiring philosophy

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

mothers-day wise inspiring

Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.

Allan Bloom

prejudice form reason

To recognize that some of the things our culture believes are not true imposes on us the duty of finding out which are true and which are not.

Allan Bloom

duty believe culture

Sycophancy toward those who hold power is a fact in every regime, and especially in a democracy, where, unlike tyranny, there is an accepted principle of legitimacy that breaks the inner will to resist.... Flattery of the people and incapacity to resist public opinion are the democratic vices, particularly among writers, artists, journalists and anyone else who is dependent on an audience.

Allan Bloom

democracy artist people

Education is not the taming or domestication of the soul's raw passions - not suppressing them or excising them, which would deprive the soul of its energy - but forming and informing them as art.

Allan Bloom

passion education art

Law may prescribe that the male nipples be made equal to the female ones, but they still will not give milk.

Allan Bloom

milk law giving

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

reading book knowledge

Once the law is broken with impunity, each man regains the right to any means he deems proper or necessary in order to defend himself against the new tyrant, the one who can break the law.

Allan Bloom

men order mean

There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.

Allan Bloom

entering students believe

Children tend to be rather better observers of adults' characters than adults are of children's, because children are so dependent on adults that it is very much in their interest to discover the weaknesses of their elders.

Allan Bloom

weakness character children

A serious life means being fully aware of the alternatives, thinking about them with all the intensity one brings to bear on life-and-death questions, in full recognition that every choice is a great risk with necessary consequences that are hard to bear.

Allan Bloom

life-and-death mean thinking

Authentic values are those by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts.

Allan Bloom

form deeds people

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

Allan Bloom

tradition

Plato says a multitude can never philosophize and hence can never recognize the seriousness of philosophy or who really philosophizes. Attempting to influence the multitude results in forced prostitution.

Allan Bloom

influence plato philosophy

The de-eroticization of the world, a companion to its disenchantment ... seems to result from a combination of causes our democratic regime and its tendencies toward leveling and self-protection, a reductionist-materialist science that inevitably interprets eros as sex, and the atmosphere generated by "the death of God" and of the subordinate god, Eros.

Allan Bloom

atmosphere self sex