Leon Wieseltier Quotes

#1. The doctrine of "exit strategy" fundamentally misunderstands the nature of war and, more generally, the nature of historical action. for the knowledge of the end is not given to us at the beginning.

Leon Wieseltier

#2. Incorruptibility by money is the old story ... Now it's incorruptibility by media.

Leon Wieseltier

#3. The questions that we must ask ourselves, and that our historians and our children will ask of us, are these: How will what we create compare with what we inherited? Will we add to our tradition or will we subtract from it? Will we enrich it or will we deplete it?

Leon Wieseltier

#4. I hear it said of somebody that he is leading a double life. I think to myself: Just two?

Leon Wieseltier

#5. A wall of books is a wall of windows.

Leon Wieseltier

#6. Her book about the money in sex gives you the feeling of the sex in money.

Leon Wieseltier

#7. The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyone's drunk and ugly and they're going to pass out in a few minutes.

Leon Wieseltier

#8. The world invited me many places.

Leon Wieseltier

#9. American Jews, like Americans, have a very consumerist attitude toward their identity: they pick and choose the bits of this and that they like.

Leon Wieseltier

#10. There are moral religious people and moral secular people, immoral religious people and immoral secular people.

Leon Wieseltier

#11. I do not value religion chiefly for its morality.

Leon Wieseltier

#12. There are times when the power of language is not the power that is needed.

Leon Wieseltier

#13. Here is a humanist proposition for the age of Google: The processing of information is not the highest aim to which the human spirit can aspire, and neither is competitiveness in a global economy. The character of our society cannot be determined by engineers.

Leon Wieseltier

#14. A thoughtless citizen of a democracy is a delinquent citizen of a democracy,

Leon Wieseltier

#15. Use the new technologies for the old purposes.

Leon Wieseltier

#16. It is never long before identity is reduced to loyalty.

Leon Wieseltier

#17. I was not interested in spending 10 years in the culture wars.

Leon Wieseltier

#18. What matters to me is that one identifies one's genuine obsessions, one's genuine commitments, one's genuine appetites, one pursues them seriously and far.

Leon Wieseltier

#19. No great deed, private or public, has ever been undertaken in a bliss of certainty.

Leon Wieseltier

#20. Dilettantism is the sort of thing one must avoid.

Leon Wieseltier

#21. The velocity and volume on the Web are so great that nothing is forgotten and nothing is remembered,

Leon Wieseltier