Leo Strauss Quotes & Sayings

Liberal relativism has its roots in the natural right tradition of tolerance or in the notion that everyone has a natural right to the pursuit of happiness as he understands happiness; but in itself it is a seminary of intolerance. — Leo Strauss

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. — Leo Strauss

But dogmatism - or the inclination "to identify the goal of our thinking with the point at which we have become tired of thinking" - is so natural to man that it is not likely to be a preserve of the past. [Citing Lessing's January 9, 1771 letter to Mendelssohn.] — Leo Strauss

God is therefore unknowable. This is the fundamental premise of the Bible. — Leo Strauss

To avert the danger [posed by theory] to life, Nietzsche could choose one of two ways: he could insist on the strictly esoteric character of the theoretical analysis of life that is, restore the Platonic notion of the noble delusion or else he could deny the possibility of theory proper and so conceive of thought as essentially subservient to, or dependent on, life or fate ... If not Nietzsche himself, at any rate his successors [Heidegger] adopted the second alternative. — Leo Strauss

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

By realizing that we are ignorant of the most important things, we realize at the same time that the most important thing for us, or the one thing needful, is quest for knowledge of the most important things or quest for wisdom. — Leo Strauss

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. — Leo Strauss

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. — Leo Strauss

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. — Leo Strauss

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. — Leo Strauss

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. — Leo Strauss

The contemporary rejection of natural right leads to nihilism - nay, it is identical with nihilism, — Leo Strauss

The silence of a wise man is always meaningful. — Leo Strauss

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. — Leo Strauss

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

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

Liberal education, which consists in the constant intercourse with the greatest minds, is a training in the highest form of modesty ... It is at the same time a training in boldness ... It demands from us the boldness implied in the resolve to regard the accepted views as mere opinions, or to regard the average opinions as extreme opinions which are at least as likely to be wrong as the most strange or least popular opinions — Leo Strauss

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

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. — Leo Strauss

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. — Leo Strauss

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. — Leo Strauss

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

Nothing ought to be said or done which could create the impression that unbiased reconsideration of the most elementary premises of philosophy is a merely academic or historical affair. — Leo Strauss

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. — Leo Strauss

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

Absolute tolerance is altogether impossible; the allegedly absolute tolerance turns into ferocious hatred of those who have stated clearly and most forcefully that there are unchangeable standards founded in the nature of man and the nature of things. — Leo Strauss

The complacency engendered by the tranquil possession of a God-given truth. — Leo Strauss

Men are constantly attracted and deluded by two opposite charms: the charm of competence which is engendered by mathematics and everything akin to mathematics, and the charm of humble awe, which is engendered by meditation on the human soul and its experiences. Philosophy is characterized by the gentle, if firm, refusal to succumb to either charm. — Leo Strauss

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. — Leo Strauss

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. — Leo Strauss

We somehow believe that our point of view is superior, higher than those of the greatest minds either because our point of view is that of our time, and our time, being later than the time of the greatest minds, can be presumed to be superior to their times; or else because we believe that each the greatest minds was right from his point of view, but not, as he claims, simply right. — Leo Strauss

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. — Leo Strauss

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. — Leo Strauss

The facile delusions which conceal from us our true situation all amount to this: that we are, or can be, wiser than the wisest men of the past. We are thus induced to play the part, not of attentive and docile listeners, but of impresarios and lion-tamers. — Leo Strauss

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. — Leo Strauss

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. — Leo Strauss

Education to perfect gentlemanship, to human excellence, liberal education consists in reminding oneself of human excellence, of human greatness. — Leo Strauss

One cannot refute what one has not thoroughly understood. — Leo Strauss

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. — Leo Strauss

If the highest things are unknowable, then the highest capacity or virtue of man cannot be theoretical wisdom. — Leo Strauss

The distinction between nature and convention is fundamental for classical political philosophy and even for most of modern political philosophy, as can be seen most simply from the distinction between natural right and positive right. — Leo Strauss

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

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

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. — Leo Strauss

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

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. — Leo Strauss

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. — Leo Strauss

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

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. — Leo Strauss

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. — Leo Strauss

Even by proving that a certain view is indispensable for living well, one proves merely that the view in question is a salutary myth: one does not prove it to be true. — Leo Strauss

When speaking of a "body of knowledge" or of "the results of research," e.g., we tacitly assign the same cognitive status to inherited knowledge and to independently acquired knowledge. To counteract this tendency a special effort is required to transform inherited knowledge into genuine knowledge by revitalizing its original discovery, and to discriminate between the genuine and the spurious elements of what claims to be inherited knowledge. — Leo Strauss

No bloody or unbloody change of society can eradicate the evil in man: as long as there will be men, there will be malice, envy and hatred, and hence there cannot be a society which does not have to employ coercive restraint. — Leo Strauss