Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice. Allan Bloom More Quotes by Allan Bloom More Quotes From Allan Bloom I am not a conservative — neo or paleo. Conservatism is a respectable outlook... I just do not happen to be that animal. Allan Bloom outlook conservative animal All literature up to today is sexist. The Muses never sang to the poets about liberated women. It's the same old chanson from the Bible and Homer through Joyce and Proust. Allan Bloom literature today men 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 ignorant students school 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. Allan Bloom struggle self opposites Nietzsche said the newspaper had replaced the prayer in the life of the modern bourgeois , meaning that the busy, the cheap, the ephemeral, had usurped all that remained of the eternal in his daily life. Allan Bloom daily-life ephemeral prayer The old view was that delicacy of language was part of the nature, the sacred nature, of eros and that to speak about it in any other way would be to misunderstand it. What has disappeared is the risk and the hope of human connectedness embedded in eros. Ours is a language that reduces the longing for an other to the need for individual, private satisfaction and safety. Allan Bloom safety risk views We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. Allan Bloom shepherds ignorant civilization The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself. Allan Bloom important age reason The utilitarian behaves sensibly in all that is required for preservation but never takes account of the fact that he must die... His whole life is absorbed in avoiding death, which is inevitable, and therefore he might be thought to be the most irrational of men, if rationality has anything to do with understanding ends or comprehending the human situation as such. Allan Bloom passion powerful men It was not necessarily the best of times in America when Catholics and Protestants were suspicious of and hated one another; but at least they were taking their beliefs seriously, and the more or less satisfactory accommodations they worked out were not simply the result of apathy about the state of their souls. Allan Bloom catholic soul america I am now even more persuaded of the urgent need to study why Socrates was accused. The dislike of philosophy is perennial, and the seeds of the condemnation of Socrates are present at all times, not in the bosoms of pleasure-seekers, who don't give a damn, but in those of high-minded and idealistic persons who do not want to submit their aspirations to examination. Allan Bloom want giving philosophy Intellectuals advertise their superiority to political practice but are absolutely in its thrall. It is no accident that Marxist theory and practice use the intellectuals as tools and keep them in brutal subservience. Allan Bloom political tools practice The distinction between the world of commerce and that of "culture" quickly became the distinction between infrastructure and superstructure, with the former clearly determining the latter. Allan Bloom infrastructure culture world Only when the true ends of society have nothing to do with the sublime does "culture" become necessary as a veneer to cover over the void. Culture can at best appreciate the monuments of earlier faith; it cannot produce them. Allan Bloom appreciate sublime doe 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. Allan Bloom liberty care essence We witness a strange inversion: on the one hand, the endeavor to turn the social contract into a less calculating and more feeling connection among its members; on the other hand, the endeavor to turn the erotic relationship into a contractual one. Allan Bloom erotic feelings hands Socrates' way of life is the consequence of his recognition that we can know what it is that we do not know about the most important things and that we are by nature obliged to seek that knowledge. Allan Bloom recognition important way 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. Allan Bloom creativity exercise men There is no real teacher who in practise does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech. Allan Bloom real teacher retirement Classical music is a special taste like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand. Allan Bloom communication greek special
