Leo Strauss Quotes
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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.
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The philosophy of Kant's great successors was consciously a synthesis of Spinoza's and Kant's philosophies. Spinoza's characteristic contribution to this synthesis was a novel conception of God. He thus showed the way toward a new religion or religiousness which was to inspire a wholly new kind of society, a new kind of Church.
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Machiavelli is not concerned with how men do live merely in order to describe it; his intention is rather, on the basis of knowledge of how men do live, to teach princes how they ought to rule and even how they ought to live.
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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.
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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.
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The sophist is concerned with wisdom, not for its own sake, not because he hates the lie in the soul more than anything else, but for the sake of the honor or the prestige that attends wisdom.
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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.
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We cannot exert our understanding without from time to time understanding something of importance; and this act of understanding may be accompanied by the awareness of our understanding, by the understanding of understanding, by noesis noesos, and this is so high, so pure, so noble an experience that Aristotle could ascribe it to his God.
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The problem inherent in the surface of things, and only in the surface of things, is the heart of things.
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We shall not shock anyone, we shall merely expose ourselves to good-natured or at any rate harmless ridicule, if we profess ourselves inclined to the old fashioned and simple opinion according to which Machiavelli was a teacher of evil.
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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.
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In order to see the relation between philosophy as rigorous science and the alternative to it clearly, one must look at the political conflict between the two antagonists, i.e. at the essential character of that conflict.
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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.
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The philosopher is ultimately compelled to transcend not merely the dimensions of common opinion, of political opinion, but the dimension of political life as such; for he is left to realize that the ultimate aim of political life cannot be reached by political life, but only by a life devoted to contemplation, to philosophy.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Dogmatism as Nietzsche means it implies that one possesses the truth, or at least the most important or the most valuable truth. Yet the truth is elusive like that woman of whom he spoke at the very beginning. Elsewhere he says we are the first generation which no longer believes that it possesses the truth. That is what he means by the end of dogmatism.
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The silence of a wise man is always meaningful.
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Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The purpose of Plato, or of Aristotle, as Al-Farabi conceived of it, is sufficiently revealed in this seemingly conventional praise of philosophy.