Leon Wieseltier
Leon Wieseltier is a American writer, critic, and magazine editor. Since 1983 he has been the literary editor of The New Republic.
Wieseltier was born in Brooklyn, New York and attended the Yeshivah of Flatbush, Columbia University, Oxford University, and Harvard University, and was a member of Harvard's Society of Fellows from 1979-1982.
Wieseltier has published several fictional and non-fictional books. Kaddish, a National Book Award finalist in 2000, is a genre-blending meditation on the Jewish prayers of mourning. Against Identity is a collection of thoughts about the modern notion of identity.
“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 weight — matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one’s own time. A wall of books is a wall of windows.”
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
“A wall of books is a wall of windows.”
Leon Wieseltier
“No great deed, private or public, has ever been undertaken in a bliss of certainty.”
Leon Wieseltier