Allan Bloom

“The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers...of all men to the exten...”

“Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment.”

“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.”

“Education is the movement from darkness to light.”

“Education is the movement from darkness to light”

“I never considered myself a writer. I'm a teacher. In a way, I feel kind of... kind of guilty for all the people who are writers who hope to be on the best-seller list someday, who live for...”

“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.”

“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 comple...”

“Shakespeare did not consider himself the legislator of mankind. He faithfully records man's problems and does not evidently propose to solve them.”

“The longing for Europe has been all but extinguished in the young.”

“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...”

“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.”

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

“Rock gives children, on a silver platter, with all the public authority of the entertainment industry, everything their parents always used to tell them they had to wait for until they grew...”

“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?”

“Shakespeare's naturalness is attested to by the strange fact that he is the only classical author who remains popular. The critical termites are massed and eating away at the foundations, tr...”

“Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it.”