Allan Bloom

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

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?

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 up and would understand later.

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 that and don't get it, and it came to me as a kind of free gift, like God coming to Abraham and announcing, 'I've chosen you!'

The way I knew I was right about something was the kids got angry. That's very important: you touch that anger.

I bless a society that tolerates and supports an eternal childhood for some, a childhood whose playfulness can, in turn, be a blessing to society.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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, trying to topple him. Whether they will succeed will be a test of his robustness.

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.

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

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

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

Education is the movement from darkness to light.

The real community of man is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers.

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.

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.

Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.

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.

Shakespeare is practically our only link with the classic and the past. The future of education has much to do with whether we will be able to cling to him or not.

Authentic values are those by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts.