Leo Strauss Quotes

Falsehoods which we spurn to-day Were the truths of long ago.

We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.

It is sometimes important for science to know how to forget the things she is surest of.

It's always amusing to look at how something early in the 20th century was written in anthropology and how it's written now. There's been an enormous shift in how it's done, but yet you can't put your finger on someone who actually did it.

I will adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.

History is always changing.

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.

Empirical explorations ultimately change our understanding of which questions are important and fruitful and which are not.

... in so many Muslim communities now, saving face trumps critical thinking and truth-telling. This is why reform from within Islam is so difficult.

When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right.

There is but a shallow stream of thought in history.

Philosophers have interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it

One duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

Making history does not necessarily change history.

… history itself appears to be abandoning the eruption of events in favor of stable structures

What the founders of modern science ... had to do was to destroy one world and replace it by another. They had to reshape the framework of our intellect itself, to restate and to reform its concepts, to evolve a new approach to Being, a new concept of knowledge, and a new concept of science — and even to replace a pretty natural approach, that of common sense, by another which is not natural at all.

Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also and keep pace with the times

Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority of his own point of view, or the more he is prepared to admit the possibility that he may have to learn something, not merely about the thinkers of the past, but from them.

History courses made up of all facts and no interpretation are guaranteed to put kids to sleep…. History comes alive when viewed as a patterned story open to ongoing debate.

Any man who stands for progress has to criticize, disbelieve and challenge every item of the old faith. Item by item he has to reason out every nook and corner of the prevailing faith. If after considerable reasoning one is led to believe in any theory or philosophy, his faith is welcomed. His reasoning can be mistaken, wrong, misled and sometimes fallacious. But he is liable to correction because reason is the guiding star of his life. But mere faith and blind faith is dangerous: it dulls the brain, and makes a man reactionary.

It is not only by the questions we have answered that progress may be measured, but also by those we are still asking. The passionate controversies of one era are viewed as sterile preoccupations by another, for knowledge alters what we seek as well as what we find.

We promote pluralism, not dogma. We critique, we do not accept uncritically. We question and we debate, and over time we will separate the wheat from the chaff. We will separate the worthwhile from the misguided in all the new ideas and new voices that we hear. But we cannot do that if we close ourselves from the contrarian view, or simply suppress the views of those who would challenge the accepted and the known.

There is no country in the world where the process of self-criticism and self-correction is more active than in the United States.

Whoever writes on world history, but not as a forensic history, becomes thereby an accomplice.