Leo Strauss Short Quotes

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

Leo Strauss
We believe that failing to call a spade a spade is not scientific.

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

Leo Strauss
Philosophizing means, then, to ascend from public dogma to essentially private knowledge.

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

Leo Strauss
The contemporary rejection of natural right leads to nihilism — nay, it is identical with nihilism,

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

Leo Strauss
The problem inherent in the surface of things, and only in the surface of things, is the heart of things.

Leo Strauss
It is of the essence of traditions that they cover or conceal their humble foundations by erecting impressive edifices on them.

Leo Strauss
Nietzsche surely bewilders us by the wealth of his thought and vision. He never said anything which he did not also contradict.

Leo Strauss
Political philosophy has lost its credibility in proportion as politics itself has become more philosophic than ever in a sense.

Leo Strauss
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
I believe you can recognize certain contemporary phenomena in what Nietzsche says but, in some respects, Nietzsche was perhaps too sanguine.

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

Leo Strauss
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
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
Nietzsche is never boring. He is always interesting, exciting, thrilling, glittering, breathtaking. He possesses a kind of brilliance and tempo which I believe was unknown in former times.

Leo Strauss
[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.

Leo Strauss
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