quotes by 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

"The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency- the belief that here and now is all there is."
— Allan Bloom

"Education is the movement from darkness to light."
— Allan Bloom

"Picture a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, lifelike electronic sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy."
— Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind)

"True openness is the accompaniment of the desire to know, hence of the awareness of ignorance. To deny the possibility of knowing good and bad is to suppress true openness."
— Allan Bloom

"Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment."
— Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind)

"Although the natural rights inherent in our( Constitutional) regime are adequate to the solution of this ( minority) problem...the equal protection of the law did not protect a man from contempt and hatred as a Jew, an Italian or a Black"..." 'Openness' was designed to provide a respectable place for those groups or minorities--to wrest respect from those who were disposed to give it--This breaks the delicate balance between majority and minority in Constitutional thought. In such a perspective where there is no common good, minorities are no longer problematic and the protection of them emerges as THE central function of government."
— Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind)