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Leo Strauss: 156 quotes9 likes

“Once we realize that the principles of our actions have no other support than our blind choice, we really do not believe in them anymore… In order to live, we have to silence the easily silenced voice of reason, which tells us that our principles are in themselves as good or as bad an any other principles. The more we cultivate reason, the more we cultivate nihilism…”

Leo Strauss

Source: Natural Right and History (1953), p. 6

“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

Source: Natural Right and History (1953), p. 36

“The purpose of Plato, or of Aristotle, as Fārābī conceived of it, is sufficiently revealed in this seemingly conventional praise of philosophy.”

Leo Strauss book Persecution and the Art of Writing

Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952), Introduction

“It was not the "God-intoxicated" philosopher but the hard-headed, not to say hard-hearted, pupil of Machiavelli and philologic-historical critic of the Bible. Orthodoxy could be returned to only if Spinoza was wrong in every respect.”

Leo Strauss

Preface
Spinoza's Critique of Religion (1965)

“The sophist, in contradistinction to the philosopher, is not set in motion and kept in motion by the sting of the awareness of the fundamental difference between conviction or belief and genuine insight.”

Leo Strauss

Source: Natural Right and History (1953), p. 116

“[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

Source: Natural Right and History (1953), p. 116

“Men must always have distinguished (e. g. in judicial matters) between hearsay and seeing with one’s own eyes and have preferred what one has seen to what he has merely heard from others. But the use of this distinction was originally limited to particular or subordinate matters. As regards the most weighty matters—the first things and the right way—the only source of knowledge was hearsay.”

Leo Strauss

Source: Natural Right and History (1953), p. 86

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

Leo Strauss

Source: What is Political Philosophy (1959), p. 73

“All there is to thinking is seeing something noticeable, which makes you see something you weren't noticing, which makes you see something that isn't even visible.”

Leo Strauss

Attributed to Strauss at many sites on the internet, this is actually Norman Maclean, in A River Runs Through It (1976)
Misattributed

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

Leo Strauss

Source: Natural Right and History (1953), p. 31

“According to our social science, we can be or become wise in all matters of secondary importance, but we have to be resigned to utter ignorance in the most important respect: we cannot have any knowledge regarding the ultimate principles of our choices, i. e. regarding their soundness or unsoundness… We are then in the position of beings who are sane and sober when engaged in trivial business and who gamble like madmen when confronted with serious issues.”

Leo Strauss

Source: Natural Right and History (1953), p. 4

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

Leo Strauss

“What is liberal education,” p. 6
Liberalism Ancient and Modern (1968)

“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.”

Leo Strauss book Thoughts on Machiavelli

Source: Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958), p. 49

“Persecution, then, gives rise to a peculiar technique of writing, and therewith to a peculiar type of literature, in which the truth about all crucial things is presented exclusively between the lines. That literature is addressed, not to all readers, but to trustworthy and intelligent readers only.”

Leo Strauss book Persecution and the Art of Writing

Source: Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952), Persecution and the Art of Writing, p. 25

“The problem inherent in the surface of things, and only in the surface of things, is the heart of things.”

Leo Strauss book Thoughts on Machiavelli

Source: Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958), p. 13

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

Leo Strauss

Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy (1971)

“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.”

Leo Strauss

“What is liberal education,” p. 8
Liberalism Ancient and Modern (1968)

“The Euthyphron is a very paradoxical dialogue. So indeed is every Platonic dialogue.”

Leo Strauss

An Untitled Lecture on Plato's Euthyphron (1996)

“The character, or tone, of a society depends on what the society regards as the most respectable or most worthy of admiration. But by regarding certain habits or attitudes as most respectable, a society admits the superiority, the superior dignity, of those human beings who most perfectly embody the habits or attitudes in question. That is to say, every society regards a specific human type (or a specific mixture of human types) as authoritative. When the authoritative type is the common man, everything has to justify itself before the tribunal of the common man; everything which cannot be justified before that tribunal becomes, at best, merely tolerated, if not despised or suspect. And even those who do not recognize that tribunal are, willy-nilly, molded by its verdicts.”

Leo Strauss

Source: Natural Right and History (1953), p. 137

“Political philosophy was concerned with the best or just order of society which is by nature best or just everywhere or always, while politics is concerned with the being and well-being of this or that particular society (a polis, a nation, an empire) that is in being at a given place for some time.”

Leo Strauss

Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy (1971)