Quotes from Leo Strauss

the complacency engendered by the tranquil possession of a God-given truth.

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

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.

This book is addressed to those who for whatever reason believe that students of political science must have some understanding of the philosophic treatment of the abiding questions; to those who do not believe that political science is scientific as chemistry and physics are — subjects from which their own history is excluded.

The cause of these uprisings was the desire to rule, rooted in acquisitiveness and the love of honor, but after a time the violence seemed to take on a life of its own.

And, indeed, the most obvious lesson of the work as a whole, for statesmen and others alike, is the sobering one that as long as our species remains, we must reckon on a human nature that will again and again, when given the chance, overpower the fragile restraints of law and justice.

That which is by nature private or a man's own is the body and only the body.[37] The needs or desires of the body induce men to extend the sphere of the private, of what is each man's own, as far as they can. This most powerful striving is countered by music education which brings about moderation, i.e., a most severe training of the soul of which, it seems, only a minority of men is capable. [37] Republic , 464d; cf. Laws 739c.

German idealism is a return to the premodern on an 'English' and therefore insufficient basis... the German idealistic concept of freedom is a synthesis of the premodern concept of virtue with the Hobbesian-Lockean concept of subjective right as the morally fundamental fact.

Art is justice"—this proposition reflects the Socratic assertion that virtue is knowledge.

Nietzsche's atheism is characterized by an element of gratitude; it is not simply a rebellion.

Young Socrates, who is not shocked by what the stranger says about killing and banishing, is rather shocked by the suggestion that rule without laws (absolute rule) can be legitimate. To understand fully the response of young Socrates, one must pay attention to the fact that the stranger does not make a distinction between human laws and natural laws.

The most awe-inspiring laws are based on more or less successful attempts to find out what is in the highest sense, namely, the gods and the soul and hence what the gods demand from men and what death means.

Men are constantly attracted and deluded by two opposite charms: the charm of competence which is engendered by mathematics and everything akin to mathematics, and the charm of humble awe, which is engendered by meditation on the human soul and its experiences. Philosophy is characterized by the gentle, if firm, refusal to succumb to either charm.

What is called freedom of thought in a large number of cases amounts to—and even for all practical purposes consists of—the ability to choose between two or more different views presented by the small minority of people who are public speakers or writers. If this choice is prevented, the only kind of intellectual independence of which many people are capable is destroyed, and that is the only freedom of thought which is of political importance.

Nietzsche] refers to two great events which in modern times were made to prevent a radical deepening of human thought: Jesuitism in the 17th century and the democratic enlightenment in the 18th and 19th. But there are two men (in each case one man) who opposed these reactionary things. In the case of Jesuitism, it was Pascal; in the case of the democratic enlightenment, it is Nietzsche.

The soul cannot be immortal if it is composed of many things unless the composition is most perfect. But the soul as we know it from our experience lacks that perfect harmony. In order to find the truth, one would have to recover by reasoning the original or true nature of the soul. This reasoning is not achieved in the Republic . That is to say, Socrates proves the immortality of the soul without having brought to light the nature of the soul.

Perhaps the most important point made in this context is the distinction between two kinds of the art of measurement: one kind which considers the greater and less in relation to one another, and another kind which considers the greater and less (now understood as excess and defect) in relation to the mean or, say, the fitting, or something similar. All arts, and especially the kingly art, make their measurements with a view to the right mean or the fitting, i.e., they are not mathematical.

It was against 'history,' against the belief that 'history' can decide any question, that progress can ever make superfluous the discussion of the primary questions [...] that [Nietzsche] reasserted hypothetically the doctrine of eternal return.

The crisis of liberalism is a crisis due to the fact that it has abandoned its absolutist basis and is trying to become entirely relativistic.

Society is not possible if ancestral custom is not regarded as sacred as far as practice is concerned.

Art presupposes nature, whereas nature doesn't presuppose art. Man's creative abilities, which are more admirable than any of his products, are not themselves produced my man: the genius of Shakespeare was not the work of Shakespeare. Nature supplies not only the materials but also the models for all arts;

We are in need of a second education in order to accustom our eyes to the noble reserve and the quiet grandeur of the classics.

To affirm that contemporary tyranny cannot be adequately understood outside the classical frame of reference is to affirm that the classics were justified in their rejection of unlimited technical progress and universal enlightenment.

We come closer then to doing justice to both aspects of Xenophon's work—Socratic and non-Socratic—and to bringing to light their possible unity, by suggesting that Xenophon may have been one who pursued the Socratic question of the best way of life without ever coming to accept completely the Socratic answer that that way of life is the philosophic one.