Allan Bloom Quotes & Sayings

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”