“There are two kinds of openness, the openness of indifference—promoted with the twin purposes of humbling our intellectual pride and letting us be whatever we want to be, just as long as we don’t want to be knowers—and the openness that invites us to the quest for knowledge and certitude, for which history and the various cultures provide a brilliant array of examples for examination.”

Source: The Closing of the American Mind (1987), p. 41.

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Allan Bloom 29
American philosopher, classicist, and academician 1930–1992

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