Leo Strauss Quotes

#1. The silence of a wise man is always meaningful.

Leo Strauss

#2. Education to perfect gentlemanship, to human excellence, liberal education consists in reminding oneself of human excellence, of human greatness.

Leo Strauss

#3. 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

#4. 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

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

Leo Strauss

#6. One cannot refute what one has not thoroughly understood.

Leo Strauss

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

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

Leo Strauss

#17. 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

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

Leo Strauss

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

Leo Strauss

#20. God is therefore unknowable. This is the fundamental premise of the Bible.

Leo Strauss

#21. The contemporary rejection of natural right leads to nihilism - nay, it is identical with nihilism,

Leo Strauss

#22. 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

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

Leo Strauss

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. The complacency engendered by the tranquil possession of a God-given truth.

Leo Strauss

#28. 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

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

Leo Strauss

#30. 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

#31. 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

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

Leo Strauss

#33. If the highest things are unknowable, then the highest capacity or virtue of man cannot be theoretical wisdom.

Leo Strauss

#34. 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

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

Leo Strauss

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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