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Portrait of Leo Strauss

Leo Strauss

(1899–1973) Politician Germany

55 quotes in 385 categories

Leo Strauss was a politician from Germany, best known for On Tyranny.

Quick Facts About Leo Strauss

Born: September 20, 1899
Died: October 18, 1973
Nationality: Germany
Profession: Politician
Notable works: On Tyranny
Known for: reductio ad Hitlerum, History of Political Philosophy, Persecution and the Art of Writing, Thoughts on Machiavelli

About Leo Strauss

Leo Strauss was a German-American political philosopher and historian of philosophy whose work greatly influenced twentieth-century political theory in the United States and the study of classical political thought. He is known best for his interpretation of ancient and medieval philosophy, his account of classical natural right, and his claim that philosophers often wrote esoterically, presenting different teachings to general and specialist readers. Strauss argued that the modern turn in philosophy, beginning with Niccolò Machiavelli and culminating in historicism and relativism, marked a decisive break with the classical understanding of politics and the good life. His work sought to recover the questions and methods of ancient political philosophy as a corrective to the perceived crisis of modern thought.

Biography source: Wikipedia

Awards & Honors

Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany honorary doctor of the University of Hamburg

Quotes by Leo Strauss · Page 2

“But dogmatism—or the inclination "to identify the goal of our thinking with the point at which we have become tired of thinking"—is…

Dogmatism

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According to our social science, we can be or become wise in all matters of secondary importance, but we have to be…

Choices

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“There is a remarkable sentence of Pascal according to which we know too little to be dogmatists and too much to be…

Communication

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Nothing ought to be said or done which could create the impression that unbiased reconsideration of the most elementary premises of philosophy…

Academic

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To avert the danger [posed by theory] to life, Nietzsche could choose one of two ways: he could insist on the strictly…

Adopted

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“Existentialism is a 'movement' which like all such movements has a flabby periphery and a hard center. That center is the thought…

Existentialism

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“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…

Love

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“But there is a tension between the respect for diversity or individuality and the recognition of natural right. When liberals became impatient…

Equality

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For try as one may to expel nature with a hayfork, it will always come back.

May

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Philosophizing means, then, to ascend from public dogma to essentially private knowledge.

Dogma

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“All human thought, including scientific thought, rests on premises which cannot be validated by human reason and which came from historical epoch…

Science

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God's reasons for communicating with man must be subsumed under his reason for communicating to him his account of his creation of…

Accounts

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The silence of a wise man is always meaningful.

Meaningful

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Education, they [philosophers] felt, is the only answer to the always pressing question, to the political question par excellence, of how to…

Answers

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By becoming aware of the dignity of the mind, we realize the true ground of the dignity of man and therewith the…

Becoming

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Even by proving that a certain view is indispensable for living well, one proves merely that the view in question is a…

Being true

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Men must always have distinguished (e.g. in judicial matters) between hearsay and seeing with one's own eyes and have preferred what one…

Distinction

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Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of…

Adequate

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The clarification of our political ideas insensibly changes into and becomes indistinguishable from the history of political ideas.

Clarification

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It is safer to try to understand the low in the light of the high than the high in the light of…

Doe

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Life is too short to live with any but the greatest books.

Book

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God is therefore unknowable. This is the fundamental premise of the Bible.

Bible

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The adjective "political" in "political philosophy" designates not so much the subject matter as a manner of treatment; from this point of…

Adjectives

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The facile delusions which conceal from us our true situation all amount to this: that we are, or can be, wiser than…

Amount

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The Jewish people and their fate are the living witness for the absence of redemption. This, one could say, is the meaning…

Absence

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Leo Strauss by topic

Men (12)