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

- Allan Bloom

The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that m…

- 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

We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the s…

- Allan Bloom

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

- Allan Bloom

There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth i…

- Allan Bloom

I am now even more persuaded of the urgent need to study why Socrates was accused. The dislike of philosophy is perennial, and the seeds of the conde…

- Allan Bloom

A good education would be devoted to encouraging and refining the love of the beautiful, but a pathologically misguided moralism instead turns such l…

- Allan Bloom

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

- Allan Bloom