Leo Strauss Quotes

It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher.

What I always liked about Socrates was his insistence on questioning things for the sake of reaching some sort of clarity - even if it is only clarity about the gaps in our knowledge.

History should be written as philosophy.

Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.

The knife of historical relativism... which has cut to pieces all metaphysics and religion must also bring about healing.

Whoever does not philosophize for the sake of philosophy, but rather uses philosophy as a means, is a sophist.

We have to make philosophy itself an object of philosophical concern.

I have a long-term interest in the humanities.

Without philosophy, history is always for me dead and dumb.

If philosophy is practice, a demand to know the manner in which its history is to be studied is entailed: a theoretical attitude toward it becomes real only in the living appropriation of its contents from the texts.

My reading of philosophy and history is desultory; I know so much and yet so little.

The great benefit of philosophy, which is also its great weakness, is that all its steps are taken in the spirit of doubt.

In general, I agree with Socrates that what democracies badly need is the examined life, and we need to think critically about ourselves.

Contemporary defenders of the Enlightenment shouldn't overgeneralize: the Enlightenment, however it is defined, is not an unalloyed good.

An empirical philosophy is in any case a kind of intellectual disrobing. We cannot permanently divest ourselves of the intellectual habits we take on and wear when we assimilate the culture of our own time and place. But intelligent furthering of culture demands that we take some of them off, that we inspect them critically to see what they are made of and what wearing them does to us. We cannot achieve recovery of primitive naïveté. But there is attainable a cultivated naïveté of eye, ear and thought.

Philosophy is explicitness, generality, orientation and assessment. That which one would insinuate, thereof one must speak.

Philosophy is the microscope of thought. Everything desires to flee from it, but nothing escapes it.

Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.

The agnostic, the skeptic, is neurotic, but this does not imply a false philosophy; it implies the discovery of facts to which he does not know how to adapt himself. The intellectual who tries to escape from neurosis by escaping from the facts is merely acting on the principle that “where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.

History teaches us that a given view has been abandoned in favor of another by all men, or by all competent men, or perhaps by only the most vocal men; it does not teach us whether the change was sound or whether the rejected view deserved to be rejected. Only an impartial analysis of the view in question, an analysis that is not dazzled by the victory or stunned by the defeat of the adherents of the view concerned - could teach us anything regarding the worth of the view and hence regarding the meaning of the historical change.

An image of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking.

For this reason poetry is something more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history.

Anyone who can look me in the eye and say they prefer the story of Moses or Jesus or Mohammed to the life of Socrates is intellectually defective.

It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher. He must be like Sophocles' Oedipus, who, seeking enlightenment concerning his terrible fate, pursues his indefatigable inquiry even though he divines that appalling horror awaits him in the answer. But most of us carry with us the Jocasta in our hearts, who begs Oedipus, for God's sake, not to inquire further.

Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.