As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead. – Allan Bloom
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
Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice. – Allan Bloom
Any notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as mens taste and capacity to live it, has disappeared. Leisure has become entertainment. – Allan Bloom
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 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 spirit is at home, if not entirely satisfied, in America. – Allan Bloom
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
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
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
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
Education is the movement from darkness to light. – Allan Bloom
