Quotes from Leo Strauss

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.

Life is the joyless quest for joy.

H]e (Socrates) thus implies that there is a parallelism between the city and the human individual or, more precisely, between the city and the soul of the human individual. This means that the parallelism between the city and the human individual is based upon a certain abstraction from the human body.

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.

Aristotle doesn't exist for Nietzsche.

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.

But dogmatism—or the inclination "to identify the goal of our thinking with the point at which we have become tired of thinking"—is so natural to man that it is not likely to be a preserve of the past. [Citing Lessing's January 9, 1771 letter to Mendelssohn.]

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.

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.

All there is to thinking is seeing something noticeable, which makes you see something you weren't noticing, which makes you see something that isn't even visible.

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

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