57 quotes
The problem inherent in the surface of things, and only in the surface of things, is the heart of things.
Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958)
The silence of a wise man is always meaningful.
Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958)
It is of the essence of traditions that they cover or conceal their humble foundations by erecting impressive edifices on them.
Natural Right and History (1953)
It is as absurd to expect members of philosophy departments to be philosophers as it is to expect members of art departments to be artists.
Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (1968)
Philosophizing means, then, to ascend from public dogma to essentially private knowledge.
Natural Right and History (1953)
Democracy, in a word, is meant to be an aristocracy which has broadened into a universal aristocracy.
Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (1968)
It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns.
Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (1968)
Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally meant.
Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (1968)
Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness.
Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (1968)
Life is too short to live with any but the greatest books.
Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (1968)
We believe that failing to call a spade a spade is not scientific.
Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958)
Education to perfect gentlemanship, to human excellence, liberal education consists in reminding oneself of human excellence, of human greatness.
Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (1968)
Philosophy has to grant that revelation is possible. But to grant that revelation is possible means to grant that philosophy is perhaps something infinitely unimportant.
Natural Right and History (1953)
Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society.
Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (1968)
The clarification of our political ideas insensibly changes into and becomes indistinguishable from the history of political ideas.
What is Political Philosophy (1959)
Science is susceptible of infinite progress. But how can science be susceptible of infinite progress if its object does not have an inner infinity?
Why We Remain Jews (1962)
No nobler dream was ever dreamt. It is surely nobler to be a victim of the most noble dream than to profit from a sordid reality and to wallow in it.
The truth of the ultimate mystery — the truth that there is an ultimate mystery, that being is radically mysterious — cannot be denied even by the unbelieving Jew of our age.
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.
What is Political Philosophy (1959)
Nothing ought to be said or done which could create the impression that unbiased reconsideration of the most elementary premises of philosophy is a merely academic or historical affair.
Natural Right and History (1953)