Leo Strauss Quotes

It is as absurd to expect members of philosophy departments to be philosophers as it is to expect members of art departments to be artists.

The belief that value judgments are not subject, in the last analysis, to rational control, encourages the inclination to make irresponsible assertions regarding right and wrong or good and bad. One evades discussion of serious issues by the simple device of passing them off as value problems, whereas, to say the least, many of these conflicts arose out of man's very agreement regarding values.

Life is the joyless quest for joy.

The most superficial fact regarding the Discourses , the fact that the number of its chapters equals the number of books of Livy 's History , compelled us to start a chain of tentative reasoning which brings us suddenly face to face with the only New Testament quotation that ever appears in Machiavelli 's two books and with an enormous blasphemy.

The silence of a wise man is always meaningful.

Men must always have distinguished (e.g. in judicial matters) between hearsay and seeing with one's own eyes and have preferred what one has seen to what he has merely heard from others. But the use of this distinction was originally limited to particular or subordinate matters. As regards the most weighty matters the first things and the right way the only source of knowledge was hearsay.

There is a remarkable sentence of Pascal according to which we know too little to be dogmatists and too much to be skeptics, which expresses beautifully what Plato conveys through his dialogues.

Education, they [philosophers] felt, is the only answer to the always pressing question, to the political question par excellence, of how to reconcile order which is not oppression with freedom which is not license.

The Jewish people and their fate are the living witness for the absence of redemption. This, one could say, is the meaning of the chosen people; the Jews are chosen to prove the absence of redemption.

But what is the core of the political? Men killing men on the largest scale in broad daylight and with the greatest serenity.

But the God of the Bible is not only One, but the only possible One.

Only a great fool would call the new political science diabolic: it has no attributes peculiar to fallen angels. It is not even Machiavellian, for Machiavelli's teaching was graceful, subtle, and colorful. Nor is it Neronian. Nevertheless one may say of it that it fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns.

The adjective "political" in "political philosophy" designates not so much the subject matter as a manner of treatment; from this point of view, I say, "political philosophy" means primarily not the philosophic study of politics, but the political, or popular, treatment of philosophy, or the political introduction to philosophy the attempt to lead qualified citizens, or rather their qualified sons, from the political life to the philosophic life.

The present Anglo-German war is then of symbolic significance. In defending modern civilisation against German nihilism, the English are defending the eternal principles of civilisation.

God's reasons for communicating with man must be subsumed under his reason for communicating to him his account of his creation of the world - and man.

Philosophy as such is nothing but genuine awareness of the problems, i.e., of the fundamental and comprehensive problems. It is impossible to think about these problems without becoming inclined toward a solution, toward one or the other of the very few typical solutions. Yet as long as there is no wisdom but only quest for wisdom, the evidence of all solutions is necessarily smaller than the evidence of the problems. Therefore the philosopher ceases to be a philosopher at the moment at which the 'subjective certainty' [quoting M. Alexandre Kojève] of a solution becomes stronger than his awareness of the problematic character of that solution. At that moment the sectarian is born. The danger of succumbing to the attraction of solutions is essential to philosophy which, without incurring this danger, would degenerate into playing with the problems. But the philosopher does not necessarily succumb to this danger, as is shown by Socrates, who never belonged to a sect and never founded one. And even if the philosophic friends are compelled to be members of a sect or to found one, they are not necessarily members of one and the same sect: Amicus Plato.

The Prussian state is, for Hegel, the model most akin to the rational state because it represents, thanks both to the Protestant religion and the authority of the monarchy, a synthesis between the revolutionary exigencies of principles and the traditional exigencies of organization.

One cannot refute what one has not thoroughly understood.

According to our social science, we can be or become wise in all matters of secondary importance, but we have to be resigned to utter ignorance in the most important respect: we cannot have any knowledge regarding the ultimate principles of our choices, i.e. regarding their soundness or unsoundness ... We are then in the position of beings who are sane and sober when engaged in trivial business and who gamble like madmen when confronted with serious issues.

All human thought, including scientific thought, rests on premises which cannot be validated by human reason and which came from historical epoch to historical epoch.

Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority of his own point of view, or the more he is prepared to admit the possibility that he may have to learn something, not merely about the thinkers of the past, but from them.

By becoming aware of the dignity of the mind, we realize the true ground of the dignity of man and therewith the goodness of the world, whither we understand it as created or uncreated, which is the home of man because it is the home of the human mind.

I cannot know anything of which there is and can be only one.

It is not self-forgetting and pain-loving antiquarianism nor self-forgetting and intoxicating romanticism which induces us to turn with passionate interest, with unqualified willingness to learn, toward the political thought of classical antiquity. We are impelled to do so by the crisis of our time, the crisis of the West.

Passionately yes, passionately no" is the worst of all tastes. And now after one has overcome that, after one has followed this natural inclination, one must learn to put some art into one's feelings and rather make an experiment with the artificial as distinguished from and opposed to the natural. That is what the true artists of life do. They do not follow the natural impulses, but experiment with the artificial.

So what Nietzsche says here is this: the better among the contemporary atheists, with whom Nietzsche is to some extent in agreement, will come to know what they are doing. They do not know it now. Now they are perfectly self–satisfied and think that they are free thinkers. They will come to realize that there is something infinitely more terrible, depressing, and degrading than religion or theism. [...] You have no idea what you are letting yourselves in for. The utter senselessness, the irrelevance of man which is implied in that atheism and you fools don't see it.

Nietzsche was not an Existentialist. Existentialism emerged out of the conflict between Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, the Danish religious writer.

Socrates then turns to the communism regarding women and children and shows that it is desirable because it will make the city more "one," and hence more perfect, than a city consisting of separate families would be: the city should be as similar as possible to a single human being or to a single living body, i.e., to a natural being. At this point we understand somewhat better why Socrates started his discussion of justice by assuming an important parallelism between the city and the individual: he was thinking ahead of the greatest possible unity of the city.

Every human being and every society is what it is by virtue of the highest to which it looks up. The city, if it is healthy, looks up, not to the laws which it can unmake as it made them, but to the unwritten laws, the divine law, the gods of the city. The city must transcend itself. ...the most important consideration concerns that which transcends the city or which is higher than the city; it does not concern things which are simply subordinate to the city.

A conservative, I take it, is a man who despises vulgarity; but the argument which is concerned exclusively with calculations of success, and is based on blindness to the nobility of the effort, is vulgar.

Life is too short to live with any but the greatest books.

Just as the banqueteers are drunk from wine, the citizens are drunk from fears, hopes, desires, and aversions and are therefore in need of being ruled by a man who is sober.

Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity. The Greeks had a beautiful word for "vulgarity"; they called it apeirokalia, lack of experience in things beautiful. Liberal education supplies us with experience in things beautiful.

The emancipation of the scholars and scientists from philosophy is according to [Nietzsche] only a part of the democratic movement, i.e. of the emancipation of the low from subordination to the high ... The plebeian character of the contemporary scholar or scientist is due to the fact that he has no reverence for himself.

Philosophizing means, then, to ascend from public dogma to essentially private knowledge.

Existentialism is a 'movement' which like all such movements has a flabby periphery and a hard center. That center is the thought of Heidegger.

It is true that the successful quest for wisdom might lead to the result that wisdom is not the one thing needful. But this result would owe its relevance to the fact that it is the result of the quest for wisdom: the very disavowal of reason must be reasonable disavowal.

It is safer to try to understand the low in the light of the high than the high in the light of the low. In doing the latter one necessarily distorts the high, whereas in doing the former one does not deprive the low of the freedom to reveal itself as fully as what it is.

The proper work of a writing is truly to talk, or to reveal the truth, to some while leading others to salutary opinions; the proper work of a writing is to arouse to thinking those who are by nature fit for it; the good writing achieves its end if the reader considers carefully the 'logographic necessity' of every part, however small or seemingly insignificant, of the writing.

All political action aims at either preservation or change. When desiring to preserve, we wish to prevent a change for the worse; when desiring to change, we wish to bring about something better. All political action is then guided by some thought of better or worse.

Nihilism is the rejection of the principles of civilisation as such ... I said civilisation, and not: culture. For I have noticed that many nihilists are great lovers of culture, as distinguished from, and opposed to, civilisation. Besides, the term culture leaves it undetermined what the thing is which is to be cultivated (blood and soil or the mind), whereas the term civilisation designates at once the process of making man a citizen, and not a slave; an inhabitant of cities, and not a rustic; a lover of peace, and not of war; a polite being, and not a ruffian.

Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness.

For try as one may to expel nature with a hayfork, it will always come back.

The clarification of our political ideas insensibly changes into and becomes indistinguishable from the history of political ideas.

If God is One, and if there can be no other God, there can be no idea of God.

History teaches us that a given view has been abandoned in favor of another by all men, or by all competent men, or perhaps by only the most vocal men; it does not teach us whether the change was sound or whether the rejected view deserved to be rejected. Only an impartial analysis of the view in question, an analysis that is not dazzled by the victory or stunned by the defeat of the adherents of the view concerned could teach us anything regarding the worth of the view and hence regarding the meaning of the historical change.