Allan David Bloom Quotes
The family spiritual void has left the field open to rock music. The result is nothing less than parents loss of control over their childrens moral education at a time when no one else is seriously concerned with it.
Allan David Bloom
Nothing noble, sublime, profound, delicate, tasteful or even decent can find a place in such tableaux [as Rock music]. There is room only for the intense, changing, crude and immediate, which Tocqueville warned us would be the character of democratic art.
Allan David Bloom
Civilization or, to say the same thing, education is the taming or domestication of the souls raw passionsnot suppressing or excising them, which would deprive the soul of its energybut forming and informing them as art.
Allan David Bloom
The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendencythe belief that the here and now is all there is.
Allan David Bloom
The distance from the contemporary and its high seriousness that students most need in order not to indulge their petty desires and to discover what is most serious about themselves cannot be found in the cinema, which now only knows the present.
Allan David Bloom
Socratic dialectic takes place in speech and, although drawn forward by the search for synthesis, always culminates in doubt. ... Marxs dialectic takes place in deed and puts an end to theoretical conflicts.
Allan David Bloom
Democratic individualism does not officially provide much of a place for leaders in a regime where everyone is supposed to be his own master. Charisma both justifies leaders and excuses followers.
Allan David Bloom
When the liberal teaching became dominant, as is the case with most victorious causes, good arguments became less necessary; and the original good arguments, which were difficult, were replaced by plausible simplificationsor by nothing. The history of liberal thought since Locke and Smith has been one of almost unbroken decline in philosophic substance.
Allan David Bloom
Nietzsche restored something like the soul to our understanding of man by providing a supplement to the flat, dry screen of consciousness, which with pure intellect looks at the rest of man as something alien, a bundle of affects of matter, like any other object of physics, chemistry and biology. The unconscious replaces all the irrational thingsabove all divine madness and eroswhich were part of the old soul and had lost significance in modernity. It provides a link between consciousness and nature as a whole, restoring therewith the unity of man.
Allan David Bloom
The side of modernity that is less interesting to Americans, which seeks less for political solutions than for understanding and satisfaction of man in his fullness or completeness, finds its profoundest statement in Nietzsche.
Allan David Bloom
Commitment is the equivalent of faith when the living God has been supplanted by self-provided values. It is Pascals wager, no longer on Gods existence but on ones capacity to believe in oneself and the goals one has set for oneself.
Allan David Bloom
Psychology finds causes of creativity that blur the difference between a Raphael and a finger painter. Everything is in that difference, which necessarily escapes our science.
Allan David Bloom
Marx denied the existence of God but turned over all His functions to History, which is inevitably directed to a goal fulfilling of man and which takes the place of Providence. One might as well be a Christian if one is so naive.
Allan David Bloom
Honesty compels serious men, on examination of their consciences, to admit that the old faith is no longer compelling. It is the very peak of Christian virtue that demands the sacrifice of Christianity.
Allan David Bloom
Universality and rationality were the hallmarks of all these teachings. But very quickly culturewhich was for Kant and, speaking anachronistically, for Rousseau, singularbecame cultures.
Allan David Bloom
