Quotes from Allan Bloom

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

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

The artist is the most interesting of all phenomena, for he represents creativity, the definition of man.

All literature up to today is sexist. The Muses never sang to the poets about liberated women. It's the same old chanson from the Bible and Homer through Joyce and Proust.

[A]ny notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as men's taste and capacity to live it, had disappeared. Leisure became entertainment.

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.

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

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?

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

Education is the movement from darkness to light.

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.

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

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