Leo Strauss Quotes

He who hates vice hates men.

Modern Americans suffer from a fear of judging. Passing judgment on the behavior of fellow human beings is considered an act of medieval, undemocratic intolerance.

You can compromise between good, better, and best, and you can compromise between bad and worse and terrible. But you can't compromise between good and evil. And now people look at the other side as a completely different kind of animal and say, 'They are taking the country down the road to purgatory.' It's complete intolerance.

Love is a given, hatred is acquired.

A man is not good or bad for one action.

The greatest moral failing is to condemn something as a moral failing: no vice is worse than being judgmental.

I don't think that's healthy for the country when anyone thinks their morals are better than anyone else's.

Race hate isn't human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature.

Liberal relativism has its roots in the natural right tradition of tolerance or in the notion that everyone has a natural right to the pursuit of happiness as he understands happiness; but in itself it is a seminary of intolerance.

There is nothing that dies so hard and rallies so often as intolerance.

A society which emphasizes uniformity is one which creates intolerance and hate.

There is no other subject on which the average mind is so much confused as the subject of tolerance and intolerance... Tolerance applies only to persons, but never to principles. Intolerance applies only to principles, but never to persons.

I know one or two things about fanaticism and death, and I reject them.

...this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate.

Broadmindedness, when it means indifference to right and wrong, eventually ends in a hatred of what is right.

It’s wrong to hate. It always has been wrong and it always will be wrong! It’s wrong in America, it’s wrong in Germany, it’s wrong in Russia, it’s wrong in China! It was wrong in two thousand B.C., and it’s wrong in nineteen fifty-four A.D.! It always has been wrong, and it always will be wrong!

How much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize?

The tolerant liberal suddenly becomes very intolerant when their official religion is challenged.

It's outrageous to me when I see people hate on someone because of their sexuality. I hate the intolerance. I hate the judgment. I hate it so much.

Those who condemn the immorality of liberal capitalism do so in comparison with a society of saints that has never existed—and never will

People are always going to, you know, find something wrong with people who are not the exact same as them. That's just what it is. Black, white, short, tall, religions, whatever. People are bad.

Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.

I know nothing of philosophical philanthropy. But I know what I have seen, and what I have looked in the face in this world here, where I find myself. And I tell you this, my friend, that there are people (men and women both, unfortunately) who have no good in them-none. That there are people whom it is necessary to detest without compromise. That there are people who must be dealt with as enemies of the human race. That there are people who have no human heart, and who must be crushed like savage beasts and cleared out of the way.

A society struggles to fulfill its best instincts, even as an individual does, and generally makes just as hard going of it. The fight against prejudice is an inevitable process. Man has been warring against his own lower nature ever since he found out he had one, and the battle against intolerance is part of the same old struggle between good and evil that has preoccupied us ever since we gave up swinging from trees.

If I can't love Hitler, I can't love at all.