Quotes by Leon Wieseltier

About Leon Wieseltier:

Leon Wieseltier is an American writer, critic, amateur philosopher and magazine editor. From 1983 to 2014, he was the literary editor of The New Republic. He is currently the Isaiah Berlin Senior Fellow in Culture and Policy at the Brookings Institution and a contributing editor and critic at The Atlantic.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

There are moral religious people and moral secular people, immoral religious people and immoral secular people.

Leon Wieseltier

The world invited me many places.

Leon Wieseltier

I was not interested in spending 10 years in the culture wars.

Leon Wieseltier

What matters to me is that one identifies one's genuine obsessions, one's genuine commitments, one's genuine appetites, one pursues them seriously and far.

Leon Wieseltier

Dilettantism is the sort of thing one must avoid.

Leon Wieseltier

[T]he strongest defense of the humanities lies not in the appeal to their utility — that literature majors may find good jobs, that theaters may economically revitalize neighborhoods — but rather in the appeal to their defiantly nonutilitarian ch...

Leon Wieseltier

The questions that we must ask ourselves, and that our historians and our children will ask of us, are these: How will what we create compare with what we inherited? Will we add to our tradition or will we subtract from it? Will we enrich it or will ...

Leon Wieseltier

But even now, with the crates piled high in the hall, what I see most plainly about the books is that they are beautiful. They take up room? Of course they do: they are an environment; atoms, not bits. My books are not dead weight, they are live weig...

Leon Wieseltier

The doctrine of "exit strategy" fundamentally misunderstands the nature of war and, more generally, the nature of historical action. for the knowledge of the end is not given to us at the beginning.

Leon Wieseltier

Her book about the money in sex gives you the feeling of the sex in money.

Leon Wieseltier

Incorruptibility by money is the old story... Now it's incorruptibility by media.

Leon Wieseltier

There are times when the power of language is not the power that is needed.

Leon Wieseltier

I do not value religion chiefly for its morality.

Leon Wieseltier

Author Bio

  • NameLeon Wieseltier
  • DescriptionAmerican writer
  • BornJune 14, 1952
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionJournalist; Author; Translator
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship