Quotes from Leo Strauss

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.

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

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.

God is therefore unknowable. This is the fundamental premise of the Bible.

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

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

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

T]he more one reads Thucydides, the less one feels that Athens's suffering was fitting or deserved. And, more generally, our first response to the book as a whole is not satisfaction at justice having been done, but is far more likely to be a feeling of sadness. This sadness arises, in large measure at least, from a growing sense that the defeat of Athens is not the victory of justice, but that justice itself is among the chief victims of the war.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Spinoza was I think a cool, not to say cold, man. His posture toward revealed religion—in particular, Judaism—was simple contempt for the confused ideas underlying revealed religion [which he regarded as] nonsense. His posture I believe is [more] that of the cocksure unbelieving scientist than that of any man of an inner tragedy.

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

But I must say, if you could vulgarize what Nietzsche says you [would] arrive at what is going on all the time in the social sciences: the destruction of the whole, of every possibility of distinguishing responsibly between high and low, good and bad.

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.

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.

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.

It thus becomes intelligible that modern Europe, once it had started out—in order to avoid the quarrel over the right faith—in search of a neutral ground as such, finally arrived at faith in technology.

The grand style of the Old Testament shows forth the greatness not of God, but of man, of what man once was. The holy God no less than the holy man are creatures of the human will to power. So that is a strange vindication of God, and we must read much deeper before we can understand it.

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

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

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.