Quotes from Leo Strauss

Philosophy is knowledge that one does not know; that is to say, it is knowledge of what one does not know, or awareness of the fundamental problems and, therewith, of the fundamental alternatives regarding their solution that are coeval with human thought.

Yet it is hard to celebrate Athens's defeat in the Sicilian campaign, even though this was the most memorable and in some ways the noblest of Athens's failures; and one cannot help but feel that here, at least, the pursuit of imperial glory was ill advised and not worth its terrible price. For not only do we feel the greatness of the army's sufferings, but also we see an ugliness in Athens that comes to light as being the cause of its defeat.

Todo ser humano y toda sociedad es lo que es en virtud de su máxima aspiración. La ciudad, si es sana, aspira no a las leyes que puede deshacer del mismo modo en que las hizo, sino a las leyes no escritas, la ley divina, los dioses de la ciudad. La ciudad debe trascenderse a sí misma. ...El factor más importante concierne a lo que trasciende la ciudad o que es más grande que la ciudad; no concierne a cosas que están simplemente subordinadas a la ciudad.

The final allegation of the accuser states that Socrates made a mischievous use of certain passages in the most highly reputed poets, interpreting, for example, a line from Hesiod to mean that one should abstain from no unjust or shameful deed but do even such things for the sake of gain. Xenophon's response speaks of Socrates' standard as the beneficial or the good; it says nothing about his views on the noble and just.

By appearing to regard the city's interests, or its freedom and its empire, as immeasurably more important than justice and, indeed, as the most important of all concerns, Diodotus succeeds in making himself trusted. And this success is dependent, of course, upon lying and deception.

Above all, knowledge of the indefinitely large variety of notions of right and wrong is so far from being incompatible with the idea of natural right that is the essential condition for the emergence of that idea: realization of the variety of notions of right is the incentive for the quest for natural right.

I]f the poets are perhaps the men who understand best the nature of the passions which the law restrains, they are very far from being merely the servants of the legislators; they are also the men from whom the prudent legislator will learn. The genuine "quarrel between philosophy and poetry" concerns, from the philosopher's point of view, not the worth of poetry as such, but the order of rank of philosophy and poetry.

The emancipation of the scholars and scientists from philosophy is according to [Nietzsche] only a part of the democratic movement, i.e. of the emancipation of the low from subordination to the high. …The plebeian character of the contemporary scholar or scientist is due to the fact that he has no reverence for himself.

M]inisterial poetry presents the nonphilosophic life as ministerial to the philosophic life and therefore, above all, it presents the philosophic life itself. The greatest example of ministerial poetry is the Platonic dialogue.

The attempt to make man absolutely at home in this world ended in man's becoming absolutely homeless.

Its status is rather like that of a painting of a perfectly beautiful human being, i.e., it is only by virtue of the painter's painting; more precisely, the just city is only "in speech": it "is" only by virtue of having been figured out with a view to justice itself or to what is by nature right on the one hand and the human all-too-human on the other.

If we were entitled to take a poetic utterance literally, we could say that the first man we know who spoke of nature was the Wily Odysseus who had seen the towns of many men and had thus come to know how much the thoughts of men differ from town to town or from tribe to tribe.

In fact, classification, the separating of things into classes or kinds, underlies our speech, our capacity to speak. According to Socrates, "conversing" ( to dialegesthai ) was given its name from the practice of those who come together to deliberate in common by separating ( to dialegein ) matters according to their kinds.

This is Nietzsche's fundamental problem: to find a way back to nature, but on the basis of the modern difficulty of conceiving of nature as the standard.

a wish is not a fact. 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. Utility and truth are two entirely different things.

Strange as it may sound, in this part of the argument it appears to be easier to persuade the multitude to accept the rule of the philosophers than to persuade the philosophers to rule the multitude: the philosophers cannot be persuaded, they can only be compelled to rule the cities.

Whereas he had originally suggested that the good city will come into being if the philosophers become kings, he finally suggests that the good city will come into being if, when the philosophers have become kings, they expel everyone older than ten from the city, i.e., separate the children completely from their parents and their parents' ways and bring them up in the entirely novel ways of the good city.

Logos without nous: that is in a way what modern science wants to be. Nous without logos is mysticism.

The Republic is based on the assumption that there is a strict parallelism between the city and the soul.

W]ith the disappearance of divine caring, i.e., of a caring by beings which in the eyes of everyone are superior to men, it became inevitable that every art or every man should believe itself or himself to be as much entitled to rule as every other art or every other man, or that at least many arts should become competitors of the kingly art. The inevitable first consequence of the transition from the age of Kronos to the age of Zeus was the delusion that all arts and all men are equal.

Through the shift of emphasis from natural duties or obligations to natural rights, the individual, the ego, had become the center and origin of the moral world, since man—as distinguished from man's end—had become that center or origin.

So the knower whom Nietzsche has in mind has not, like Kant, the stark heaven above himself and to that one could say [also] the moral law within him, because he is beyond good and evil. But precisely because he is a knower in this sense he has a very exacting morality, a morality indeed beyond good and evil.

In this connection it should be mentioned that in describing the regimes, Socrates does not speak of "ideologies" belonging to them; he is concerned with the character of each kind of regime and with the end which it manifestly and explicitly pursues, as well as with the political justification of the end in question in contradistinction to any transpolitical justification stemming from cosmology, theology, metaphysics, philosophy of history, myth, and the like.

Monarchy by itself stands for the absolute rule of the wise man or of the master; democracy stands for freedom. The right mixture is that of wisdom and freedom, of wisdom and consent, of the rule of wise laws framed by a wise legislator and administered by the best members of the city and of the rule of the common people.