Top 70 Allan Bloom Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Education is the movement from darkness to light.”

— Allan Bloom

2. “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

3. “It may well be that a societys greatest madness seems normal to itself.”

— Allan Bloom

4. “Self-interest is hostile to the common good, but enlightened self-interest is not. And this is the best key to the meaning of enlightenment.”

— Allan Bloom

5. “Historicism and cultural relativism actually are a means to avoid testing our own prejudices and asking, for example, whether men are really equal or whether that opinion is merely a democratic prejudice.”

— Allan Bloom

6. “We need history, not to tell us what happened or to explain the past, but to make the past alive so that it can explain us and make a future possible.”

— Allan Bloom

7. “Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts.”

— Allan Bloom

8. “The sirens sing sotto voce these days, and the young already have enough wax in their ears to pass them by without danger.”

— Allan Bloom

9. “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

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10. “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

11. “An education, other than purely professional or technical, can even seem to be an impediment.”

— Allan Bloom

12. “The first discipline modernity’s originators imposed upon themselves was that of self-restraint, learning to live with vulgarity. Their high expectations for effectiveness were made possible by low expectations of what was to be.”

— Allan Bloom

13. “University convention submerges nature. It issues licenses, and hunting without one is forbidden.”

— Allan Bloom

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

— Allan Bloom

15. “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

16. “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

17. “The self is the modern substitute for the soul.”

— Allan Bloom

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “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

22. “Culture as art is the peak expression of man’s creativity, his capacity to break out of nature’s narrow bounds, and hence out of the degrading interpretation of man in modern natural and political science.”

— Allan Bloom

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

— Allan Bloom

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

— Allan Bloom

25. “We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished.”

— Allan Bloom

26. “Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise – -as priests, prophets or philosophers are wise. Specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.”

— Allan Bloom

27. “Utopianism is, as Plato taught us at the outset, the fire with which we must play because it is the only way we can find out what we are. We need to criticize false understandings of Utopia, but the easy way out provided by realism is deadly.”

— Allan Bloom

28. “Professors of Greek forget or are unaware that Thomas Aquinas, who did not know Greek, was a better interpreter of Aristotle than any of them have proved to be, not only because he was smarter but because he took Aristotle more seriously.”

— Allan Bloom

29. “The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.”

— Allan Bloom

30. “Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication.”

— Allan Bloom

31. “Every age is blind to its own worst madness.”

— Allan Bloom

32. “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

33. “A new language always reflects a new point of view, and the gradual unconscious popularization of new words, or of old words used in new ways, is a sure sign of a profound change in people’s articulation of the world.”

— Allan Bloom

34. “Openness, as currently conceived, is a way of making surrender to whatever is most powerful, or worship of vulgar success, look principled.”

— Allan Bloom

35. “This nation’s impulse is toward the future, and tradition seems more of a shackle to it than an inspiration.”

— Allan Bloom

36. “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

37. “Human nature must not be altered in order to have a problem-free world. Man is not just a problem-solving being, as behaviorists would wish us to believe, but a problem-recognizing and -accepting being.”

— Allan Bloom

38. “Most of all I admire Mozart’s capacity to be both deep and rational, a combination often said to be impossible.”

— Allan Bloom

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

— Allan Bloom

40. “The substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for.”

— Allan Bloom

41. “There is no real education that does not respond to felt need; anything else acquired is trifling display.”

— Allan Bloom

42. “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

43. “Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason’s power.”

— Allan Bloom

44. “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

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

— Allan Bloom

46. “Education is not sermonizing to children against their instincts and pleasures, but providing a natural continuity between what they feel and what they can and should be.”

— Allan Bloom

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

— Allan Bloom

48. “The end result is that there can be no more truth or goodness and no need or even ability to make tough choices. Where the purpose of higher education once was to enable the student to find truth, the modern university teaches that there is no truth, only ’lifestyle.”

— Allan Bloom

49. “The spirit is at home, if not entirely satisfied, in America.”

— Allan Bloom

50. “Bacon, Locke, Descartes, Hume, and all the others knew they were giving rights to vulgarity. But in so doing in addition to caring for man’s well-being they were providing rights for themselves.”

— Allan Bloom