Henry Strauss Quotes

Listen to me." Her voice is urgent now. "Life can feel very long sometimes, but in the end, it goes so fast." Her eyes are glassy with tears, but she is smiling. "You better live a good life, Henry Strauss.

Henry Strauss wakes her with kisses.

Henry Strauss has never been a morning person. He wants to be one, has dreamed of rising with the sun, sipping his first cup of coffee while the city is still waking, the whole day ahead and full of promise. He's tried to be a morning person, and on the rare occasion he managed to get up before dawn, it was a thrill: to watch the day begin, the feel, at least for a little while, that he was ahead instead of behind. But then the night would grow long, and the day would start late, and now he feels like there's no time at all. Like he is always late for something.

Take a drink every time you hear a lie. You're a great cook. (They say as you burn toast.) You're so funny. (You've never told a joke.) You're so... ... handsome. ... ambitious. ... successful. ... strong. (Are you drinking yet?) You're so... ... charming. ... clever. ... sexy. (Drink.) So confident. So shy. So mysterious. So open. You are impossible, a paradox, a collection at odds. You are everything to everyone. The son they never had. The friend they've always wanted. A generous stranger. A successful son. A perfect gentleman. A perfect partner. A perfect... Perfect... (Drink.) They love your body. Your abs. Your laugh. The way you smell. The sound of your voice. They want you. (Not you.) They need you. (Not you.) They love you. (Not you.) You are whoever they want you to be. You are more than enough, because you are not real. You are perfect, because you don't exist. (Not you.) (Never You.) They look at you and see whatever they want... Because they don't see you at all.

Outside the window, the day just carries on as if nothing’s changed, but it feels like everything has, because Addie LaRue is immortal, and Henry Strauss is damned.

Henry Strauss wakes her with kisses. He plants them one by one, like flower bulbs, lets them blossom on her skin.

Listen to me.” Her voice is urgent now. “Life can feel very long sometimes, but in the end, it goes so fast.” Her eyes are glassy with tears, but she is smiling. “You better live a good life, Henry Strauss.

He can't hold time at bay. It is racing forward now, rushing away. And Addie looks at him as if she can read his mind, see the storm building in his head. But she is sunshine. She is clear skies.

Henry Strauss walks home alone through the dark. Addie, he thinks, turning the name over in his mouth. Addie, who looked at him and saw a boy with dark hair, kind eyes, an open face. Nothing more. And nothing else. A cold gust blows, and he pulls his coat close, and looks up at the starless sky. And smiles.

Feels the warm circle of his arms as he pulled her back beneath the covers, the clean scent of him, the ease in his voice when she said, Don't forget, and he said, Never.

Life can feel very long sometimes, but in the end, it goes so fast." Her eyes are glassy with tears, but she is smiling. "You better live a good life, Henry Strauss.

Put your hand over mine," he says, and she hesitates only a moment before pressing her palm to the back of his hand, ghosting her fingers over his own. "There," he says, "now we can draw.

Henry Strauss has never been a morning person. He wants to be one, has dreamed of rising with the sun, sipping his first cup of coffee while the city is still waking, the whole day ahead and full of promise. He’s tried to be a morning person, and on the rare occasion he’s managed to get up before dawn, it was a thrill: to watch the day begin, to feel, at least for a little while, like he was ahead instead of behind. But then a night would go long, and a day would start late, and now he feels like there’s no time at all. Like he is always late for something.

Henry Samuel Strauss, this is bullshit.

Perhaps most important, Strauss, Arendt, and Kissinger all started out in America in the same place, rejecting the ideologies that provided the grounding for the vast majority of their fellow German-Jewish émigrés. They were neither Marxists nor Zionists (though all felt a deep emotional attachment to Israel), nor did they adopt the quasi-official ideology of the United States, liberal democracy. What was left for them? Arendt provided the most succinct and memorable answer: all three engaged in what she called “thinking without a banister.” In

As Garrison had tried to show, belatedly, the Gray Board hearings were patently unfair and outrageously extrajudicial. The primary responsibility for the proceedings lay with Lewis Strauss. But as chairman of the board, Gordon Gray could have ensured that the hearing was conducted properly and fairly. He did not do his job. Instead of taking control of the hearing to maintain fairness, which would have required him to rein in Robb’s illicit tactics, he allowed Robb to control the proceedings. Prior to the hearing, Gray permitted Robb to meet exclusively with the board to review the FBI files, a direct violation of the AEC’s 1950 “Security Clearance Procedures.” He accepted Robb’s recommendation that Garrison be denied a similar meeting; he acquiesced to Robb’s refusal to reveal his witness list to Garrison; he did not share Lawrence’s damaging written testimony with the defense; he did nothing to expedite a security clearance for Garrison. The Gray Board was, in sum, a veritable kangaroo court in which the head judge accepted the prosecutor’s lead. As AEC commissioner Henry D. Smyth would insist, any objective legal review of how the hearing was conducted surely would result in its nullification.

What did Strauss mean by philosophy? Not what it was commonly understood to be. Philosophers were not to be found teaching in colleges and universities around the country because instructors in philosophy departments were no more likely to be true philosophers than instructors in art departments were to be true artists. Philosophy wasn’t an academic discipline or the stepping-stone to a career defined by the structures and customs of higher education. It was a personal commitment, a way of life, inspired by a sense of wonder, much like a religion though without the dogma. Philosophers were devoted to wisdom but didn’t propound doctrines or claim to have discovered the Truth. Their wisdom, like that of the prototype Socrates, consisted of an awareness that they knew nothing. Insofar as they could be said to possess knowledge, it was of the questions, not the answers, and philosophers ceased to be philosophers, Strauss said, when certainty replaced Socratic doubt. Monk-like, they pursued a contemplative life of reasoned discussion and disputation about that which they did not know, far from the meaningless bustle of the everyday world. Their advantage over the ignorant masses was their intellectual humility. All

There was worse. Philosophers needed to be able to think freely and to follow their ideas wherever they might lead. There was a kind of sociopathic madness to their endeavor. They were the ultimate iconoclasts, subversive by their very nature, because social and political activity was based on popular opinion, public dogma, and unexamined tradition, whereas philosophy existed to scrutinize all opinions, dogmas, and traditions. For those bounded by a belief in common morality, which is to say just about everyone, philosophers were immoralists or, at best, amoralists. These suspicions of the general public were not unfounded. Philosophers really were subversive! (Here, too, Strauss and Arendt shared a common—one might say Nietzschean—perspective. “Thinking,” Arendt wrote, “inevitably has a destructive, undermining effect on all established criteria, values, measurements for good and evil, in short on those customs and rules of conduct we treat of in morals and ethics.”) To survive in a world intrinsically hostile to freethinking, philosophers had to employ “esoteric writing” while presenting a public face of moderation and quiescence, whatever radical ideas they might be harboring. “Thought must be not moderate, but fearless, not to say shameless. But moderation is a virtue controlling the philosopher’s speech.” Or as Strauss also put it: “In political things it is a sound rule to let sleeping dogs lie.” The best hope for the preservation of freedom of thought was to remain inconspicuous. The wise knew not to poke the beast. Inconspicuousness was not always possible. Constantly vulnerable to tyrants and to tyrannical majorities, philosophers were in need of friends, not only other philosophers with whom they could exchange ideas but also more practical people who could mediate between the contemplative elite and the vulgar masses. The philosophers’ best friends in the ordinary world were the people Strauss called “gentlemen.” Philosophers were not equipped to plunge into the political world, which consisted of “very long conversations with very dull people on very dull subjects.” Neither did they have the power to impose their will on the majority even if they had wanted to, which they didn’t. Instead, they needed the help of gentlemen who appreciated the value of freedom of thought yet could function among the ignorant populace. Philosophers, who were disinterested by definition, could instruct these gentlemen to shun private advantage and personal gain for the common good—and it would help if the gentlemen were wealthy so that the prospect of acquiring riches at the public expense would be less enticing—but it was up to the gentlemen to act as the bridge between the pure thinking of the minority and the material self interest of the majority and to win the support of the citizenry at large.

Henry Strauss walks home alone through the dark. Addie, he thinks, turning the name over in his mouth. Addie, who looked at him and saw a boy with dark hair, kind eyes, an open face. Nothing more. And nothing else.

At this point, one is brought face-to-face with a subject not frequently acknowledged, what might be called Kissinger’s Continental “humanism,” his fervent embrace of the role of human freedom in humankind’s affairs: autonomous individuals with all their experience, emotions, values, quirks, and foibles mattered more to him than the construction of models. Algorithms knew nothing of irony or tragedy. And with this, Kissinger revealed his intellectual affinity with those German-Jewish writers who similarly approached life as freethinkers without preconceived ideologies, who deliberated “without banisters”—Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, and Hans Morgenthau. Just as Strauss took on the quantifiers at the University of Chicago in the name of personal responsibility, Kissinger challenged the quantifiers of the foreign policy establishment in the name of individual judgment. Had Kissinger accepted the offer early in his career to take a position at the University of Chicago, there is no doubt that he would have taken a stand as an ally of the embattled Strauss against the school’s headcounters, much as Morgenthau did. Kissinger joined with Strauss in condemning the view that “only ‘scientific’ knowledge is genuine knowledge” and agreed with him that “the sciences, both natural and political, are frankly nonphilosophical.

Morgenthau once confronted Arendt directly about her politics. At a 1972 conference in Toronto organized around her work, Morgenthau challenged her: “What are you? Are you a conservative? Are you a liberal? Where is your position within the contemporary possibilities?” To which Arendt responded: “I don’t know. I really don’t know and I’ve never known. And I suppose I never had any such position. You know the left think I am conservative, and the conservatives sometimes think I am left or I am a maverick or God knows what. And I must say I couldn’t care less. I don’t think the real questions of this century will get any kind of illumination by this kind of thing.” Her views couldn’t be confined within the standard categories or with the help of “banisters,” and neither could Morgenthau’s. “I am nowhere,” she told Mary McCarthy at the same conference. Years earlier, as a young scholar, Morgenthau had similarly declared: “You are asking where I stand politically? My answer is: nowhere.” Left, right, center—these were labels to be attached to people within the American political spectrum, not to outsiders like Arendt or Morgenthau, or to Leo Strauss, or to Henry Kissinger. The many attempts that have been made over the years to pigeonhole them—was Strauss a neocon? was Arendt an “icon of the left”? was Morgenthau a “conservative liberal”? was Kissinger a war criminal?—have only created intellectual confusion.

Strauss, for his part, did see value in what the political scientists were doing. The data they collected and the statistical analyses they performed could be “useful” (he said somewhat condescendingly) because they provided “knowledge of political things,” that is, of public opinion and common prejudices. Even so, Strauss could also be deeply skeptical about exactly what it was that public opinion polls revealed, as “many answers to the questionnaires are given by unintelligent, uninformed, deceitful and irrational people,” and “not a few questions are formulated by people of the same caliber.” In

I believe it is dangerous,” he said, “if the opponents of National Socialism withdraw to a mere conservatism which defines its ultimate goal by a specific tradition.” The reason to fight Hitler and the Nazis was to defend “the eternal principles of civilization,” or as he also put it, “the conscious culture of humanity” and “the conscious culture of reason.” That is, Strauss was not fighting the Nazis to defend the liberal democratic principles of freedom, tolerance, and equality, as were most Americans. Unlike the fundamental value of Western civilization, the ground on which he was making his stand, all these reasons were problematic in Strauss’s eyes, weak and insubstantial arguments against the Nazi juggernaut—principles of justice, perhaps, but justice without a sword. Freedom was no end in itself because in its present form it had become an excuse for unrestrained license, divorced from any concept of virtue and social responsibility. Instructed in modern liberal ideas about the rights of man, people thought themselves entitled to pursue their greediest, ugliest, most base, and most perverse desires with no acknowledgment of limit or conscience. It was what Strauss called “the victory of the gutter.” Weimar Germany was a model of this kind of freedom. But “not everything is permitted,” Strauss said, and “restraint is as natural to man as is freedom.” The ancients had a firmer and more nuanced understanding of freedom because they didn’t think only of rights: “Premodern thought put the emphasis on duty, and rights, as far as they were mentioned at all, were understood only as derivative from duties.” Western civilization was as much about limits and responsibilities as it was about liberty.

Four centuries later, the German-American philosopher Leo Strauss would link Machiavelli’s ideas with Plato’s by concluding that to achieve the ideal model of the philosopher-king, theoretical and political wisdom—that is, philosophers and kings—would have to be kept separate: “There is a necessary conflict between philosophy and politics if the element [contributed by] society necessarily is [only] opinion.”12 Rather than producing a unity of both infused in a single ruler, the philosopher would rule the state through proximity to power. In such an arrangement, the philosopher could pursue and apply his or her accumulated knowledge, distant enough from the uncleanliness of politics to preserve purity of thought but close enough for a society to benefit from the result.