Leo Strauss Quotes

We are not makers of history. We are made by history.

It's wrong to look at what we call 'Enlightenment values' as some fad of the 18th century. It's deeply rooted in ancient history.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

… ideas are structures built over time, each part added by a new generation.

Can we ignore what is going on around us, can we disconnect ourselves, our own material situation, our spiritual selves, who we are, can we disconnect that from history and the social context of our lives? The older I get, the more I'm convinced that we cannot, that we are social creatures.

The history of ideas is littered with the corpses of those who have tried to define culture.

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I'm using my own memory, and I'm using my collective memory.

Furthermore, the study of the present surroundings is insufficient: the history of the people, the influence of the regions through which it has passed on its migrations, and the people with whom it came into contact, must be considered.

There's a need to keep the history of an artform going, parallel with the new work that's being done.

Without history we are the prisoners of the accident of where and when we were born.

There is an almost anti-epicurean tradition at the very base of America. For much of the middle part of American history, people who wanted to overcome that went to France.

The history of mankind is the history of ideas.

We examine and highlight the history of the African descendants in America, and know that each and every one of us has come this far because of our faith in this country.

In conclusion we may say, in view of the confirmation that our study has given of the parallelism between individual and racial thought of the Self, that in the history of psychology we discern the great profile which the race has drawn on the pages of time.

The history of art is the history of revivals.

Everything has been said, and we are more than seven thousand years of human thought too late.

I subscribe to William Faulkner's' view that history is not just about what we were before but who we are now.

History is the key to everything: politics, religion, even fashion.

I don't think all buildings have to be iconic, but the history of the world has shown us that cultures build iconic buildings for their major public buildings.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

A poem I write is not just about me; it is about national identity, not just regional but national, the history of people in relation to other people. I reach for these outward stories to make sense of my own life, and how my story intersects with a larger public history.

I don't have space to enter into the examples or the history of this, so I'm left with having to make the bold statement that culture is extinct.

Never underestimate how history injects itself into the present.

He who wants to make history bear on politics must be sure that his history is objective; otherwise, history will not influence politics, but rather politics history.

Our questions and answers are in part determined by the historical tradition in which we find ourselves. We apprehend truth from our own source within the historical tradition.