Daily Inspiration Quote by Allan Bloom

Bloom opens with the faux-comfort of certainty only to land a cultural indictment: the one stable belief on campus is that nothing is stable. The line works because it turns relativism from a nuanced philosophical position into a mass credential, the kind of belief you “say” you believe because it signals membership. That quick pivot - “believes, or says he believes” - is the tell. Bloom isn’t only worried about ideas; he’s worried about performance. Relativism, in his telling, has become less an argument than a posture: a ready-made badge of tolerance that conveniently immunizes students from the risk of being wrong.

The subtext is equal parts suspicion and lament. When truth is framed as “relative” on day one, education stops being an invitation to pursue the true and becomes training in non-judgment, a soft politics of etiquette. Bloom’s jab is that this posture flatters students as open-minded while quietly shrinking their intellectual appetite. If no claim can reach beyond perspective, then Plato is just “his truth,” constitutional principles are just “their truth,” and the classroom becomes a showroom of opinions rather than a workshop for discernment.

Context matters: Bloom is writing out of the late-20th-century American university, where pluralism, post-Vietnam cynicism, and the rising prestige of cultural critique made “absolutes” sound authoritarian. His sentence is polemical by design: it caricatures to provoke. The irony is that he uses absolutist rhetoric (“absolutely certain”) to expose what he sees as relativism’s own dogma - a new orthodoxy that congratulates itself for having none.