Allan Bloom Real Quotations

There is no real education that does not respond to felt need; anything else acquired is trifling display.

There is no real teacher who in practise does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech.

Locke had illegitimately selected those parts of man he needed for his social contract and suppressed all the rest, a theoretically unsatisfactory procedure and a practically costly one. The bourgeois is the measure of the price paid, he who most of all cannot afford to look to his real self, who denies the existence of the thinly boarded-over basement in him, who is most made over for the purposes of a society that does not even promise him perfection or salvation but merely buys him off.

Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication.

The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contraditory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth, of potential knowers... of all men to the extent that they know.