Allan Bloom

“The university has become a place of moral virtue, but one that is squishy and can’t be defined.”

“A crisis in the university is a crisis in civilization.”

“The substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for.”

“Education is the movement from darkness to light.”

“The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities.”

“History is the story of the deeds of great men. And laws are the bloodless substitutes for the deeds of great men.”

“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.”

“As soon as a man takes up a microphone, he is driven to power.”

“The self is the modern substitute for the soul.”

“Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts.”

“Music is the soul's primitive and unconscious statistical mathematics.”

“Law may prescribe that the male nipples be made equal to the female ones, but they still will not give milk.”

“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.”

“The artist is the most dangerous man in any society governed by the reason.”

“The essence of intellectual freedom is the right to reconceive the nature of things.”

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

“Indignation is the soul’s defense against the wound of evil.”

“What is called 'creative' is a refusal to submit to the traditional.”

“Liberal education is at the core of our civilization.”

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