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. ”

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

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

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

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

Education is the movement from darkness to light. ”

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