Leo Strauss - Education Quotes

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The works of the great writers of the past are very beautiful even from without. And yet their visible beauty is sheer ugliness, compared with the beauty of those hidden treasures which disclose themselves only after very long, never easy, but always pleasant work. This always difficult but always pleasant work is, I believe, what the philosophers had in mind when they recommended education. Education, they 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
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.

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

Leo Strauss
A mass culture is a culture which can be appropriated by the meanest capacities without any intellectual or moral effort whatsoever. … Liberal education is the counterpoison to mass culture, to the corroding effects of mass culture, to its inherent tendency to produce nothing but specialists without spirit or vision and voluptuaries without heart.

Leo Strauss
Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society.

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

Leo Strauss