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 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
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
Cause and effect, the riddle of all history, is a particular devil in financial history and never more so than today, where entire classes of security are collapsing not on public exchanges and stock-tickers but because there are no markets to establish prices this side of nothing. – James Buchan