Leo Strauss Quotes

“Aristotle doesn’t exist for Nietzsche.”

“But I must say, if you could vulgarize what Nietzsche says you would arrive at what is going on all the time in the social sciences: the destruction of the whole, of every possibility of distinguishing responsibly between high and low, good and bad.”

“More precisely, in its earlier, healthier form the herd morality implied already that the sole standard of goodness is a utility for the herd—that is to say, for the common good. Independence, superiority, inequality are esteemed and recognized to the extent to which they were thought to be subservient to the common good or indispensable for it and not for their own sake. The common good was understood of course as a good of a particular society or tribe, and it demanded therefore hostility to the tribe’s external and internal enemies and in particular to criminals. This was part of the original herd morality.
But this has completely changed in contemporary Europe. When the herd morality draws its ultimate consequences, as it does now, it takes the sides of the very criminals and becomes afraid of inflicting punishment. It is satisfied with making the criminal harmless, which is something very different from disarming the criminal [and] from inflicting punishment. By abolishing even the fear of the criminal, this is all justified by the identification of goodness with compassion.”

“Nietzsche is never boring. He is always interesting, exciting, thrilling, glittering, breathtaking. He possesses a kind of brilliance and tempo which I believe was unknown in former times.”

“Passionately yes, passionately no” is the worst of all tastes. And now after one has overcome that, after one has followed this natural inclination, one must learn to put some art into one’s feelings and rather make an experiment with the artificial as distinguished from and opposed to the natural. That is what the true artists of life do. They do not follow the natural impulses, but experiment with the artificial.”

“So I believe then that the primary motive, the most intelligible motive of the doctrine of eternal return in Nietzsche is to make intelligible nature as humanly willed and not given. And the whole difficulty in Nietzsche’s philosophy, I believe, is concentrated in this point.”

“So the knower whom Nietzsche has in mind has not, like Kant, the stark heaven above himself and to that one could say [also] the moral law within him, because he is beyond good and evil. But precisely because he is a knower in this sense he has a very exacting morality, a morality indeed beyond good and evil.”

“So what Nietzsche says here is this: the better among the contemporary atheists, with whom Nietzsche is to some extent in agreement, will come to know what they are doing. They do not know it now. Now they are perfectly self–satisfied and think that they are free thinkers. They will come to realize that there is something infinitely more terrible, depressing, and degrading than religion or theism. [...] You have no idea what you are letting yourselves in for. The utter senselessness, the irrelevance of man which is implied in that atheism and you fools don’t see it.”

“Spinoza was I think a cool, not to say cold, man. His posture toward revealed religion—in particular, Judaism—was simple contempt for the confused ideas underlying revealed religion [which he regarded as] nonsense. His posture I believe is [more] that of the cocksure unbelieving scientist than that of any man of an inner tragedy.”

“The grand style of the Old Testament shows forth the greatness not of God, but of man, of what man once was. The holy God no less than the holy man are creatures of the human will to power. So that is a strange vindication of God, and we must read much deeper before we can understand it.”

“There was a criticism written millennia ago but it is usually not considered, and that is in Aristophanes’ Assembly of Women, where they tried to establish a fully egalitarian society. And the women do that, and for this purpose: the women must rule. So this kind of inequality of the two sexes must prevail, just as the women’s lib movement would also lead in practice to gynecocracy, not to equality. All right, then we have this beautiful situation: everyone is equal and the women are the mothers who feed their children, the males. And a part of this, the feeding, is of course also sexual gratification. And here there comes in the difference between women who are attractive and women who are not attractive. A natural inequality. Therefore the legislator has to make a special law in order to equalize that inequality. So that (if I may be so crude, but since Aristophanes has done it before me I have some excuse) if a young man cannot sleep with a young girl before he has slept with an ugly one, there is a privilege given to the inferior to equalize people. That is the problem.”