Leo Strauss Quotes
Education to perfect gentlemanship, to human excellence, liberal education consists in reminding oneself of human excellence, of human greatness.
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.
If the highest things are unknowable, then the highest capacity or virtue of man cannot be theoretical wisdom.
Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness.
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.
Philosophizing means, then, to ascend from public dogma to essentially private knowledge.
The contemporary rejection of natural right leads to nihilism - nay, it is identical with nihilism.
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.
The clarification of our political ideas insensibly changes into and becomes indistinguishable from the history of political ideas.
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.