Strauss Quotes & Sayings

Enough already of Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault poured like ketchup over everything. Lacan: the French fog machine; a grey-flannel worry-bone for toothless academic pups; a twerpy, cape-twirling Dracula dragging his flocking stooges to the crypt. Lacan is a Freud T-shirt shrunk down to the teeny-weeny Saussure torso. The entire school of Saussure, inluding Levi-Strauss, write their muffled prose of people with cotton wool wrapped around their heads; they're like walking Q-tips. Derrida: a Gloomy Gus one-trick pony, stuck on a rhetorical trope already available in the varied armory of New Criticism. Derrida's method: masturbating without pleasure. It's a birdbrain game for birdseed stakes. Neo-Foucaldian New Historicism: a high-wax bowling alley where you score points just by knockng down the pins. — Camille Paglia

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 the essentials of humanity's artistic treasures can be found in New York. — Claude Levi-Strauss

Too much contemporary fiction seems purposefully to address small things in small ways. And yet why not try for the all-inclusive, the gripping, for the audacious? — Darin Strauss

To undermine a person's self-respect is a sin. ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery — Abbey Strauss

I hate travelling and explorers — Claude Levi-Strauss

Surprisingly, Manhattan casts a sort of undersized shadow onto Long Island. Where I grew up, everyone seemed totally disconnected from the city - ours could have been any suburb, anywhere - though when traffic was thin, it took us only half an hour to get into midtown. — Darin Strauss

Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi looks in the mirror and sees a playboy of the old school. And men such as Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Charlie Sheen no doubt look at Berlusconi and think, 'Role model!' Women, of course, know otherwise. They see him as an aging, pathetic buffoon. — Graydon Carter

The work of the painter, the poet or the musician, like the myths and symbols of the savage, ought to be seen by us, if not as a superior form of knowledge, at least as the most fundamental and the only one really common to us all; scientific thought is merely the sharp point more penetrating because it has been whetted on the stone of fact, but at the cost of some loss of substance and its effectiveness is to be explained by its power to pierce sufficiently deeply for the main body of the tool to follow the head. — Claude Levi-Strauss

Gifts make slaves. — Levi-Strauss

My training and my inclination is to invent. — Darin Strauss

I lock onto his beautiful blue eyes, memorizing his face. The way his eyes crinkle at the corners when he laughs, the way they flash blue when he's happy and grow dark when he's sad. I'll miss his flop of dark hair and his dimples when he smiles. — Elle Strauss

You will speed up your growth by being selfish. So imagine that the people you're looking at can actually take care of themselves. And if you ask for what you want and trust that the other person will say yes or no powerfully, it will make things very interesting. — Neil Strauss

Like all writing rules, the injunction to start with the trouble can be broken, and it should be sometimes - if there's good reason. — Darin Strauss

The Strauss Group identified water as a strategic category presenting significant business opportunity in line with the Group's long term business strategy and vision. We view the development of a technology that enables high quality drinking water for both home and offices as a means to improve the quality of life of millions of people. — Ofra Strauss

God is on the side of the winner. — Neil Strauss

There is a place where cerebral an corporeal meet: they call it rowing — Barry S. Strauss

If rowing is a trial then the ergometer is the courtroom, the meter is the jury. And an honest jury at that, because the numbers do not lie. — Barry S. Strauss

Gingerbread Man A Nursery Rhyme Suspense Lee Strauss — Lee Strauss

As [Gershom] Scholem explains, this [Shabbetaian] doctrine is connected to the idea that 'the elect are fundamentally different from the crowd and not to be judged by its standards. Standing under a new spiritual law and representing as it were a new kind of reality, they are beyond good and evil'. Strauss's philosopher-prophet is a secularized version of the same conceit. — Shadia Drury

Judgment helps one to make the appropriate decision at the appropriate moment and diminish the influence of fate. — Darin Strauss

An expert knows all the answers - if you ask the right questions. — Levi-Strauss

Not to be too 'Tale of Two Cities' about it, but I find writing a memoir easier than writing fiction, and more difficult. — Darin Strauss

The novelist has permission to do whatever she chooses to supercharge whatever's interesting in her story. This is also known as freedom. — Darin Strauss

Noah had transformed in my eyes, too, but it wasn't because he had changed. It was my perception of him that had changed. He'd always been the cool person I'd come to know and respect, I'd just been blinded by my prejudices. — Lee Strauss

Having to act like an adult because I was directing a big movie but also feeling like a child because we had reindeer and big cameras and they had fake snow. I just wanted to go play in the snow. — Todd Strauss-Schulson

I've wanted to make movies for so long. I learned most of what I know from director commentaries and behind the scenes featurettes and criterions. — Todd Strauss-Schulson

Strauss Group continues to strengthen its future growth engines, improve the company's competitive position, and increase market share, while continuing streamlining processes, improvements, and carrying out organizational adjustments in the company. — Ofra Strauss

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter. — Darin Strauss

I'm really wary of self-help books. — Darin Strauss

Never let the horns and woodwinds out of your sight; if you can hear them at all, they are too loud. — Richard Strauss

He wished me luk. I hope I have luk. I got my rabits foot and my luky penny and my horshoe. Dr Strauss said dont be so superstishus Charlie. This is sience. I dont know what sience is but they all keep saying it so maybe its something that helps you have good luk. — Daniel Keyes

Society isn't good at dealing with people who have something concrete to feel guilty about or who are dealing with a loss. — Darin Strauss

The wise man doesn't give the right answers, he poses the right questions. — Claude Levi-Strauss

On conducting: If you can just barely hear the French horns on stage, the balance is perfect. — Richard Strauss

Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter ... will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age. — Lewis Strauss

'Pay it forward' has become a hackneyed concept, but I truly believe in it, and it gives me huge satisfaction to be able to help writers in a measurable way. — Victoria 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

There is a downside to casual sex: Sometimes it stops being casual. People develop a desire for something more. And when one person's expectations don't match the other person's, then whoever holds the highest expectations suffers. There is no such thing as cheap sex. It always comes with a price. — Neil Strauss

In Colma, a suburb of San Francisco, California there's a proposal pending to tax ... the dead. If proponents get their way, grave sites will be taxed $5 dollars - per grave, per year - for eternity. In Colma the dead outnumber the living by a ratio of roughly 1000-to-1, including such notables as: Wyatt Earp, Levi Strauss, and William Randolph Hearst. And they, apparently, haven't paid their fair share. For liberals, when it comes to taxes ... nothing is sacred. — Rush Limbaugh

The designation of the locality in one excludes the appearances narrated by the rest; the determination of time in another leaves no space for the narratives of his fellow-evangelists; the enumeration of a third is given without any regard to the events reported by his predecessors; lastly, among several appearances recounted by various narrators, each claims to be the last, and yet has nothing in common with the others. Hence nothing but wilful blindness can prevent the perception that no one of the narrators knew and presupposed what another records. — David Friedrich Strauss

The dogma of cultural relativism is challenged by the very people for whose moral benefit the anthropologists established it in the first place. The complaint the underdeveloped countries advance is not that they are being westernized, but that the westernization is proceeding too slowly. — Claude Levi-Strauss

I shall never be converted, and I shall remain true to my old religion of the classics until my life's end. — Richard Strauss

Not only does a journey transport us over enormous distances, it also causes us to move a few degrees up or down in the social scale. It displaces us physically and also for better or for worse takes us out of our class context, so that the colour and flavour of certain places cannot be dissociated from the always unexpected social level on which we find ourselves in experiencing them. — Claude Levi-Strauss

Globalization means that business strategy and business ethics cannot be separated from each other. — Ofra Strauss

Never look at the trombones. You'll only encourage them. — Richard Strauss

In this life, we don't meet many people who truly love us, who accept us for who we are, who put us before themselves. — Neil Strauss

I think my love is storytelling. No matter what it is, it's storytelling. And so whatever the medium is, what's right for the story, I enjoy doing it. — Neil Strauss

Ideas, like young wine, should be put in storage and taken up again only after they have been allowed to ferment and to ripen. — Richard Strauss

I consider that all Jews in the Diaspora, and thus it is true in France, should everywhere they can lend their support to Israel. This is why it is also important that Jews take political responsabilities ... In sum, in my functions and in my everyday life, through the whole of my actions, I try to make so that my modest stone is brought to the construction of the land of Israel. — Dominique Strauss-Kahn

Those who ask for help are often those who have failed to do something for themselves. — Neil Strauss

Watching the ball is always a good starting point. — Andrew Strauss

I have literally no idea what it's like to shoot a 2D movie. I'd only shot things that were 7 minutes long with a video camera in my apartment with friends. — Todd Strauss-Schulson

It's good training for a novelist to try to discern the truth about a place after only a few glimpses of it. — Darin Strauss

Rowing it was pointed out, was a sport that risked few injuries. So it was, I ould discover, but only if you did it right. — Barry S. Strauss

The anthropologist respects history, but he does not accord it a special value. He conceives it as a study complementary to his own: one of them unfurls the range of human societies in time, the other in space. — Claude Levi-Strauss

Things don't go away. They become you. There is no end, as T.S. Eliot somewhere says, but addition: the trailing consequence of further days and hours. No freedom from the past, or from the future.
But we keep making our way, as we have to. We're all pretty much able to deal even with the worst that life can fire at us, if we simply admit that it is very difficult. I think that's the whole of the answer. We make our way, and effort and time give us cushion and dignity. And as we age, we're riding higher in the saddle, seeing more terrain. — Darin Strauss

I think it's a wonderful fact about Judaism - at least about the approach to Judaism I most relate to: There are no universal answers. We don't have it all figured out. God is unknowable. — Darin Strauss

So I can understand the mad passion for travel books and their deceptiveness. They create the illusion of something which no longer exists but still should exist, if we were to have any hope of avoiding the overwhelming conclusion that the history of the past twenty thousand years is irrevocable. — Claude Levi-Strauss

It's the effort that shows the way, and if you keep trying, one day the answer will be clear. — Lee Strauss

The good thing is that women have such high expectations of men that it inspires us to live up to them. That's what I learned about male-female relationships. — Neil Strauss

I have come to love you in spite of
Do I want to be loved in spite of? ... Does anyone? — Darin 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

Write what you think is good, is the whole of the law. — Darin Strauss

For everything is history: What was said yesterday is history, what was said a minute ago is history. But, above all, one is led to misjudge the present, because only the study of historical development permits the weighing and evaluation of the interrelationships among the components of the present-day society. — Claude Levi-Strauss

The time was 7:40 A.M. I reached for the phone. "Do you have your axe?" came the voice on the other end. It was Mad Dog. "Yes." "Is your axe sharp?" "No, but I can sharpen it while you're driving here." "How about your knife?" "Got it." "Everything needs to be nice and sharp. — Neil Strauss

I always admired very much the virtuosity in Strauss because, really, he's a master of using the orchestra. And I like virtuosity, I must say, even if the taste of the music is not always mine. — Pierre Boulez

A good organizer is key to anyone with a busy social life. — Neil Strauss

A rich man doesn't need to tell you he's rich. — Neil Strauss

True endurance, I think, comes from the inside. It comes from motivation and belief in what you're doing. — Neil Strauss

For mile after mile the same melodic phrase rose up in my memory. I simply couldn't get free of it. Each time it had a new fascination for me. Initially imprecise in outline, it seemed to become more and more intricately woven, as if to conceal from the listener how eventually it would end. This weaving and re-weaving became so complicated that one wondered how it could possibly be unravelled; and then suddenly one note would resolve the whole problem, and the solution would seem yet more audacious than the procedures which had preceded, called for, and made possible its arrival; when it was heard, all that had gone before took on a new meaning, and the quest, which had seemed arbitrary, was seen to have prepared the way for this undreamed-of solution. — Claude Levi-Strauss

I had violated one of Ross Jeffries's only ethical rule of seduction: Leave her better than you found her. — Neil Strauss

At home in bed that first night I had patchy, mundane dreams about normal things. It would be nobler and less uncomfortable to write that I tossed sleeplessly. — Darin 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

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

I am fascinated to hear of the impact that ESOPs have had on work-force morale in corporations of all sizes such as Sears Roebuck, Potomac Electric Power, Lowe's Companies and the Dow Chemical Company. — Robert S. Strauss

Your intention for a book is never the same as the reception. — Neil Strauss

That's when I started to leave it behind. I realized that I got my entire validation from women. Women became like gods to me, but false gods. — Neil Strauss

The most perfect melodic shapes are found in Mozart; he has the lightness of touch which is the true objective ... Listen to the remarkable expansion of a Mozart melody, to Cherubino's 'Voi che sapete', for instance. You think it is coming to an end, but it goes farther, even farther. — Richard Strauss

The strong live off the weak and the clever live off the strong. — Neil Strauss

I've seen rock stars agonize over the fact that another artist has far more Facebook 'likes' and Twitter followers than they do. — Neil Strauss

We can understand, too, that natural species are chosen not because they are 'good to eat' but because they are 'good to think.' — Levi-Strauss

It's a very performative thing, grief. As with so much in modern life, I think there's a whole performative layer to what we do because we feel like there's a private TV show viewing our lives. — Darin Strauss

Accepting others' life choices is something most people only learn with age. — Neil Strauss

Anthropology found its Galileo in Rivers, its Newton in Mauss. — Claude Levi-Strauss

Think of aerobics plus weight lifting minus the music or camaraderie. Combine unalloyed endurance with straightforward strength and demand poise, timing, and practiced form as well. Think of pure pain: that's the ergometer. — Barry S. 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

But who are we, really? Just a bundle of good genes and bad genes mixed with good habits and bad habits. And since there's no gene for coolness or confidence, then being uncool and unconfident are just bad habits, which can be changed with enough guidance and will power. — Neil Strauss

... each woman is a wonderful world unto herself. And monogamy? It's like choosing to live in a single town and never traveling to experience the beauty, history, and enchantment of all the other unique, wonderful places in the world. Why does love have to limit us?
Perhaps it doesn't. Only fear is restrictive. Love is expansive. And I wonder, since fear of enmeshment impels us to avoid commitment and fear of abandonment makes us possessive, what type of evolved relationship can emerge once those wounds are healed? — Neil Strauss

Now, whether my not asking for good things to happen to me is subconsciously intended to win me brownie points with God is something I can't answer. But I do feel the need to give thanks and also not to feel hypocritical by asking for things when I have doubts that God would answer me. — Darin Strauss

For the rest of the night, the Amazon and I talked. Every now and then, she'd drag me to the bathroom, where I'd watch her inhale cocaine like a human Dustbuster. "Do — Neil Strauss

I am certain that Gadi Lesin's abilities and the experience he accumulated during his sixteen years in a variety of general management roles in Strauss Group in and outside of Israel will enable him, together with group management and all managers and employees of Strauss, to continue to take the group forward to further success. — Ofra Strauss

For productive collaboration adopt five principles: involve the relevant stakeholders, build consensus phase by phase, design a process map, designate a process facilitator and harness the power of group memory. — David Friedrich Strauss

The room was a library. Not a public library, but a private library; that is, a collection of books belonging to Justice Strauss. There were shelves and shelves of them, on every wall from the floor to the ceiling, and separate shelves of them in the middle of the room. The only place were there weren't books was in one corner, where there were some large, comfortable-looking chairs and a wooden table with lamps hanging over them, perfect for reading. Although it was not as big as their parents library, it was cozy, and the Baudelaire children were thrilled. — Lemony Snicket

I was never revolutionary. The only revolutionary in our time was Strauss! — Arnold Schoenberg

My caddy today was a Scot and he told me that he was cheering for Australia, which I thought was a bit harsh. But generally I've been amazed at how many people have come up to me here in Scotland and said: 'I've never really watched cricket before, but I was hooked all summer.' It's great. — Andrew Strauss

We can't speak day after day about globalization without at the same time having in mind that ... we need multilateral solutions. — Dominique Strauss-Kahn

Never ask a woman if you may kiss her. Instead, learn to read body language. — Neil Strauss

Objects are what matter. Only they carry the evidence that throughout the centuries something really happened among human beings. — Levi-Strauss

I spent three and a half years writing the novel 'Chang & Eng,' about the conjoined brothers for whom the term 'Siamese twins' was contrived, and when I think of these afflicted people, my only emotion is one of profound sympathy. — Darin Strauss