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

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

Education is the movement from darkness to light

— Allan Bloom

Education is the movement from darkness to light.

— Allan Bloom

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

— Allan Bloom

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

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.

— Allan Bloom

Our Nation, a great stage for the acting out of great thoughts, presents the classic confrontation between Locke's views of the state of nature and Rousseau's criticism of them... Nature is raw material, worthless without the mixture of human labor; yet nature is also the highest and most sacred thing. The same people who struggle to save the snail-darter bless the pill, worry about hunting deer and defend abortion. Reverence for nature, mastery of nature-whichever is convenient.

— Allan Bloom

Shakespeare is to me the purest voice of nature, and he does not meddle with nature. His plays provide us with the greatest variety of erotic expression, and with Shakespeare Eros is the proper term to use.

— 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