Top 50 Leo Strauss Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The silence of a wise man is always meaningful.”

— Leo Strauss

2. “One cannot refute what one has not thoroughly understood.”

— Leo Strauss

3. “It is safer to try to understand the low in the light of the high than the high in the light of the low. In doing the latter one necessarily distorts the high, whereas in doing the former one does not deprive the low of the freedom to reveal itself as fully as what it is.”

— Leo Strauss

4. “No bloody or unbloody change of society can eradicate the evil in man: as long as there will be men, there will be malice, envy and hatred, and hence there cannot be a society which does not have to employ coercive restraint.”

— Leo Strauss

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

— Leo Strauss

6. “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.”

— Leo Strauss

7. “Absolute tolerance is altogether impossible; the allegedly absolute tolerance turns into ferocious hatred of those who have stated clearly and most forcefully that there are unchangeable standards founded in the nature of man and the nature of things.”

— Leo Strauss

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

— Leo Strauss

9. “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

10. “A conservative, I take it, is a man who despises vulgarity; but the argument which is concerned exclusively with calculations of success, and is based on blindness to the nobility of the effort, is vulgar.”

— Leo Strauss

11. “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.”

— Leo Strauss

12. “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

13. “Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness.”

— Leo Strauss

14. “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

15. “If the highest things are unknowable, then the highest capacity or virtue of man cannot be theoretical wisdom.”

— Leo Strauss

16. “Philosophizing means, then, to ascend from public dogma to essentially private knowledge.”

— Leo Strauss

17. “Nietzsche’s criticism can be reduced to one proposition: modern man has been trying to preserve biblical morality while abandoning biblical faith. That is impossible.”

— Leo Strauss

18. “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.”

— Leo Strauss

19. “Life is the joyless quest for joy.”

— Leo Strauss

20. “God is therefore unknowable. This is the fundamental premise of the Bible.”

— Leo Strauss

21. “For try as one may to expel nature with a hayfork, it will always come back.”

— Leo Strauss

22. “There is a remarkable sentence of Pascal according to which we know too little to be dogmatists and too much to be skeptics, which expresses beautifully what Plato conveys through his dialogues.”

— Leo Strauss

23. “Just as the banqueteers are drunk from wine, the citizens are drunk from fears, hopes, desires, and aversions and are therefore in need of being ruled by a man who is sober.”

— Leo Strauss

24. “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.”

— Leo Strauss

25. “God’s reasons for communicating with man must be subsumed under his reason for communicating to him his account of his creation of the world – and man.”

— Leo Strauss

26. “The distinction between nature and convention is fundamental for classical political philosophy and even for most of modern political philosophy, as can be seen most simply from the distinction between natural right and positive right.”

— Leo Strauss

27. “Aristotle doesn’t exist for Nietzsche.”

— Leo Strauss

28. “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

29. “The Prussian state is, for Hegel, the model most akin to the rational state because it represents, thanks both to the Protestant religion and the authority of the monarchy, a synthesis between the revolutionary exigencies of principles and the traditional exigencies of organization.”

— Leo Strauss

30. “The present Anglo-German war is then of symbolic significance. In defending modern civilisation against German nihilism, the English are defending the eternal principles of civilisation.”

— Leo Strauss

31. “Nietzsche was not an Existentialist. Existentialism emerged out of the conflict between Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, the Danish religious writer.”

— Leo Strauss

32. “It is not self-forgetting and pain-loving antiquarianism nor self-forgetting and intoxicating romanticism which induces us to turn with passionate interest, with unqualified willingness to learn, toward the political thought of classical antiquity. We are impelled to do so by the crisis of our time, the crisis of the West.”

— Leo Strauss

33. “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

34. “If God is One, and if there can be no other God, there can be no idea of God.”

— Leo Strauss

35. “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

36. “The facile delusions which conceal from us our true situation all amount to this: that we are, or can be, wiser than the wisest men of the past. We are thus induced to play the part, not of attentive and docile listeners, but of impresarios and lion-tamers.”

— Leo Strauss

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

— Leo Strauss

38. “Only a great fool would call the new political science diabolic: it has no attributes peculiar to fallen angels. It is not even Machiavellian, for Machiavelli’s teaching was graceful, subtle, and colorful. Nor is it Neronian. Nevertheless one may say of it that it fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns.”

— Leo Strauss

39. “But the God of the Bible is not only One, but the only possible One.”

— Leo Strauss

40. “The proper work of a writing is truly to talk, or to reveal the truth, to some while leading others to salutary opinions; the proper work of a writing is to arouse to thinking those who are by nature fit for it; the good writing achieves its end if the reader considers carefully the ‘logographic necessity’ of every part, however small or seemingly insignificant, of the writing.”

— Leo Strauss

41. “By virtue of being an -ism, pluralism is a monism.”

— Leo Strauss

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

— Leo Strauss

43. “Passionately yes, passionately no” is the worst of all tastes. And now after one has overcome that, after one has followed this natural inclination, one must learn to put some art into one’s feelings and rather make an experiment with the artificial as distinguished from and opposed to the natural. That is what the true artists of life do. They do not follow the natural impulses, but experiment with the artificial.”

— Leo Strauss

44. “In a sense, all political use of Nietzsche is a perversion of his teaching. Nevertheless, what he said was read by political men and inspired them. He is as little responsible for fascism as Rousseau is responsible for Jacobinism. This means, however, that he is as much responsible for fascism as Rousseau was for Jacobinism.”

— Leo Strauss

45. “So I believe then that the primary motive, the most intelligible motive of the doctrine of eternal return in Nietzsche is to make intelligible nature as humanly willed and not given. And the whole difficulty in Nietzsche’s philosophy, I believe, is concentrated in this point.”

— Leo Strauss

46. “Nothing lovable is eternal or sempiternal or deathless, or that the eternal is not lovable.”

— Leo Strauss

47. “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

48. “Political atheism is a distinctly modern phenomenon. No premodern atheist doubted that social life required belief in, and worship of, God or gods.”

— Leo Strauss

49. “The Athenian cannot refute the atheists before he has stated their assertions. It appears that they assert that body is prior to soul or mind, or that soul or mind is derivative from body and, consequently, that nothing is by nature just or unjust, or that all right originates in convention. The refutation of them consists in the proof that soul is prior to body, which proof implies that there is natural right.”

— Leo Strauss

50. “Generally speaking, in pre-modern times you had an idealistic tradition, which was political, and a hedonisic tradition, which was non-political. Now in the 17th century a merger of these two traditions takes place, a political hedonism. And that is one of the greatest changes which has ever happened, and of course up to the present day this determines, with many modifications, that would lead us too far.”

— Leo Strauss