Top 100 Roger Scruton Quotes
#1. Freedom can reside only in a point of view, a way of looking upon the system of necessity.Surely this is the one freedom that we may attain to: not to be released from physical reality, but to understand reality and ourselves as part of it, and so be reconciled to what we are.
Roger Scruton
#2. When, in the works of Lacan, Deleuze and Althusser, the nonsense machine began to crank out its impenetrable sentences, of which nothing could be understood except that they all had "capitalism" as their target, it looked as though Nothing had at last found its voice.
Roger Scruton
#3. It is to overlook the culture that has focused, down the centuries, on the business of repentance.
Roger Scruton
#4. Jean-Pierre Marquis, From a Geometrical Point of View: A Study of the History and Philosophy of Category Theory, Springer Science & Business Media, 2008.
Roger Scruton
#5. Paul Benacerraf, 'What Numbers Could Not Be,' Philosophical Review (1965).
Roger Scruton
#6. We've got to stand up not only for free speech, but also for all that we've inherited from the Enlightenment and from Christianity.
Roger Scruton
#7. The future of mankind, for the socialist, is simple: pull down the existing order and allow the future to emerge.
Roger Scruton
#8. We must not think of this merely as a theological or metaphysical question. For
Roger Scruton
#9. Beauty is an ultimate value - something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given. Beauty should therefore be compared to truth and goodness, one member of a trio of ultimate values which justify our rational inclinations.
Roger Scruton
#11. Modernist buildings exclude dialogue, and the void that they create around themselves is not a public space but a desertification
Roger Scruton
#12. Kant's position is extremely subtle - so subtle, indeed, that no commentator seems to agree with any other as to what it is.
Roger Scruton
#13. A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is 'merely relative,' is asking you not to believe him. So don't.
Roger Scruton
#14. A civilization is a social entity that manifests religious, political , legal, and customary uniformity over an extended period, and which confers on its members the benefits of socially accumulated knowledge.
Roger Scruton
#15. When gifts are replaced by rights, so is gratitude replaced by claims. And claims breed resentment
Roger Scruton
#16. Something new seems to be at work in the contemporary world - a process that is eating away the very heart of social life, not merely by putting salesmanship in place of moral virtue, but by putting everything - virtue included - on sale.
Roger Scruton
#17. In general we should be aware of, and protective towards, those precious legal instruments that we already possess, and which often depend on principles of equity and natural law and not on top-down legislation.
Roger Scruton
#18. Christians have inherited from Saint Augustine and from Plato the vision of this transient world as an icon of another and changeless order. They understand the sacred as a revelation in the here and now of the eternal sense of our being.
Roger Scruton
#19. But this experience taught me that our civilization cannot survive if we continue to appease the Islamists.
Roger Scruton
#20. The very same 'mystery' that veils the human person from the neurophysiologist veils human history from the Marxian determinist and human morality from the sociobiologist.
Roger Scruton
#21. Given that Europe's legacy to the world consists in the two great goods of Christianity and democracy it is hardly surprising if the EU no longer has the endorsement of the European people, even if it has created a network of clients upon whose support it can always rely.
Roger Scruton
#22. accountable government does not come through elections. It comes through respect for law, through public spirit and through a culture of confession. To
Roger Scruton
#23. Marriage does not exist for the benefit of the present generation but for the benefit of the next
Roger Scruton
#24. Sanctions make a substantial contribution to power based on privation, and they have never hurt a single despot in the whole history of their use.
Roger Scruton
#25. Architecture, like dress, is an exercise in good manners, and good manners involve the habit of skillful insincerity - the habit of saying "good morning" to those whose mornings you would rather blight, and of passing the butter to those you would rather starve.
Roger Scruton
#26. We have to take our neighbours seriously, as people with an equal claim to protection, for whom we might be required, in moments of crisis, to face mortal danger. We do this because we believe ourselves to belong together in a shared home. The
Roger Scruton
#27. Affect not to despise beauty: no one is freed from its dominion; But regard it not a pearl of price
it is fleeting as the bow in the clouds.
Roger Scruton
#28. Without a criterion enabling us to distinguish genuine human rights from the many impostors we will never be sure that our legal provisions, however wise, benevolent and responsible, will be secure against the individual desire to escape from them.
Roger Scruton
#29. Classical buildings endure because they are loved, admired and accepted, and enjoy an innate adaption to human needs and purposes.
Roger Scruton
#30. The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation.
Roger Scruton
#31. The fictions were far more persuasive than the facts, and more persuasive than both was the longing to be caught up in a mass movement of solidarity, with the promise of emancipation at the end. My father's grievances were real and well founded. But his solutions were dreams.
Roger Scruton
#32. The wars of the twentieth century brought home the fundamental truth that people will fight for their country and unite in its defence, but will seldom fight for their class, even when the intellectuals are egging them on. At
Roger Scruton
#33. Sometimes the intention is to shock us. But what is shocking first time around is boring and vacuous when repeated.
Roger Scruton
#34. When art becomes merely shock value, our sense of humanity is slowly degraded.
Roger Scruton
#35. The love of beauty is really a signal to free ourselves from that sensory attachment, and to begin the ascent of the soul towards the world of ideas, there to participate in the divine version of reproduction, which is the understanding and the passing on of eternal truths.
Roger Scruton
#36. Political order, in short, requires cultural unity, something that politics itself can never provide.
Roger Scruton
#37. Beauty is assailed from two directions - by the cult of ugliness in the arts, and by the cult of utility in everyday life.
Roger Scruton
#38. The first effect of modernism was to make high culture difficult: to surround beauty with a wall of erudition.
Roger Scruton
#39. Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch.
Roger Scruton
#40. A philosophy that begins in doubt assails what no-one believes, and invites us to nothing believable
Roger Scruton
#41. Whose freedom, how exercised, how circumscribed and how defined?
Roger Scruton
#42. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition all this is well known, and incorporated into the sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church as well as the rituals and liturgy of Yom Kippur.
Roger Scruton
#43. England for him was no longer a real place, but a consecrated isle in the lake of forgetting, where the God of the English still strode through an imaginary Eden, admiring His works.
Roger Scruton
#44. And in answering that question he saw the inside of that bleak Viking world, the reality of love and compassion that all these hammer-throwing and skull-smashing gods concealed. That
Roger Scruton
#45. The pageant of a former hour, Is Beauty in the Grave.
Roger Scruton
#46. Beauty is not the source of disinterested pleasure, but simply the object of a universal interest: the interest that we have in beauty, and in the pleasure that beauty brings.
Roger Scruton
#47. Private property is one of the best institutions which has ever evolved, to protect us from the bullying of others.
Roger Scruton
#48. Whatever our religion and our private convictions, we are the collective inheritors of things both excellent and rare, and political life, for us, ought to have one overriding goal, which is to hold fast to those things, in order to pass them on to our children.
Roger Scruton
#49. Creativity is not enough ... the skill of the true artist is to show the real in the light of the ideal and so transfigure it.
Roger Scruton
#50. In our democratic culture people often think it is threatening to judge another person's taste. Some are even offended by the suggestion that there is a difference between good and bad taste, or that it matters what you look at or read or listen to.
Roger Scruton
#51. Music addresses us from beyond the borders of the natural world
Roger Scruton
#52. [T]o teach virtue we must educate the emotions, and this means learning "what to feel" in the various circumstances that prompt them.
Roger Scruton
#53. Art has the ability to redeem life by finding beauty even in the worst aspect of things.
Roger Scruton
#54. Leftwing people find it very hard to get on with rightwing people, because they believe that they are evil. Whereas I have no problem getting on with leftwing people, because I simply believe that they are mistaken.
Roger Scruton
#55. The freedom to entertain and express opinions, however offensive to others, has been regarded since Locke as the sine qua non of a free society. This
Roger Scruton
#56. The heretic is the one who speaks against the community from a place within its territory. He is the enemy within. The heathen, by contrast, is safely behind the walls, excluded by his own invincible arrogance.
Roger Scruton
#57. There is a deep human need for beauty and if you ignore that need in architecture your buildings will not last
Roger Scruton
#58. In discussing tradition, we are not discussing arbitrary rules and conventions. We are discussing answers that have been discovered to enduring questions. These
Roger Scruton
#59. The music takes over the words and makes them speak to me in another language.
Roger Scruton
#60. Art and music shine a light of meaning on ordinary life, and through them we are able to confront the things that trouble us and to find consolation and peace in their presence.
Roger Scruton
#61. Something of the child's pure delight in creation survives in every true work of art.
Roger Scruton
#62. Jack regarded himself as locked in a lifelong struggle with this establishment, on behalf of the Anglo-Saxon peasantry whose birthright had been stolen a thousand years earlier by the Norman knights.
Roger Scruton
#63. Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.
Roger Scruton
#64. Liberty is not the same thing as equality, and that those who call themselves liberals are far more interested in equalizing than in liberating their fellows.
Roger Scruton
#65. Individuals in Western states are sovereign over their own households; they enjoy consumer sovereignty through the market and political sovereignty through elections.
Roger Scruton
#66. Art once made a cult of beauty. Now we have a cult of ugliness instead. This has made art into an elaborate joke, one which by now has ceased to be funny.
Roger Scruton
#67. Like adverts, today's works of art aim to create a brand, even if they have no product to sell except themselves.
Roger Scruton
#68. Conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this lies the secret of its success.
Roger Scruton
#69. The first axiom of Marx Scientist is that everything they tell you is a lie. The second axiom is that it doesn't matter, since you are lying too. The third axiom is 'Kill all liars!
Roger Scruton
#70. The consolation of an imaginary thing is still a real consolation.
Roger Scruton
#71. Corbyn was not elected by the parliamentary party but by people who have the luxury of sounding off without the responsibility of answering for it. Corbyn represents the idiocy of direct democracy, and the culture of resentment that takes advantage of it.
Roger Scruton
#72. Concerning no subject would [George Bernard] Shaw be deterred by the minor accident of total ignorance from penning a definitive opinion.
Roger Scruton
#73. The greatest modern philosopher was moved by nothing more than by duty. His life, in consequence, was unremarkable.
Roger Scruton
#74. Robert Conquest once announced three laws of politics, the first of which says that everyone is right-wing in the matters he knows about.
Roger Scruton
#75. The great benefit of philosophy, which is also its great weakness, is that all its steps are taken in the spirit of doubt.
Roger Scruton
#76. Realism...is a kind of disappointed tribute to the ideal.
Roger Scruton
#77. I am not an advocate of Enlightenment. On the contrary, I see it as a form of light pollution, which prevents us from seeing the stars.
Roger Scruton
#78. Pop pollution has an effect on musical appreciation comparable to pornography on sex. All that is beautiful, special and full of love is replaced by a grinding mechanism. Just as porn addicts lose the capacity for real sexual love, so do pop addicts lose the capacity for genuine musical experience.
Roger Scruton
#79. A philosopher who says, 'There are no truths, only interpretations,' risks the retort: 'Is that true, or only an interpretation?'
Roger Scruton
#80. Strident minorities, acting on the growing disposition to censor their opponents, ensure that the deeper the question, the more likely it is to be settled by shallow arguments.
Roger Scruton
#81. Being unpopular is never easy; but being unpopular in a good cause is a shield against despair.
Roger Scruton
#82. This "knowing what to do" ... is a matter of having the right purpose, the purpose appropriate to the situation in hand ... The one who "knows what to do" is the one on whom you can rely to make the best shot at success, whenever success is possible.
Roger Scruton
#83. Styles may change, details may come and go, but the broad demands of aesthetic judgement are permanent.
Roger Scruton
#84. Wanting it for its beauty is not wanting to inspect it: it is wanting to contemplate it - and that is something more than a search for information or an expression of appetite. Here is a want without a goal: a desire that cannot be fulfilled since there is nothing that would count as its fulfilment.
Roger Scruton
#85. When truth cannot make itself known in words, it will make itself known in deeds.
Roger Scruton
#86. States are more like people than they are like anything else: they exist by purpose, reason, suffering, and joy. And peace between states is also like peace between people. It involves the willing renunciation of purpose, in the mutual desire not to do, but to be.
Roger Scruton
#87. The culture of a civilization is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.
Roger Scruton
#88. In 1970s Britain, conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half-mad recluses.
Roger Scruton
#89. If you consider only utility, the things you build will soon be useless ... nobody wants to be in it.
Roger Scruton
#90. No market economy can function properly without the support of legal and moral sanctions, designed to hold individual agents to their bargains, and to return the cost of misbehaviour to the one who causes it. But
Roger Scruton
#91. The goal, Karel said, was not to tell explicit lies but to destroy the distinction between the true and the false, so that lying becomes neither necessary nor possible.
Roger Scruton
#92. The art establishment has turned away from the old curriculum which puts beauty and craft at the top of the agenda.
Roger Scruton
#93. Gradually this truth is beginning to dawn on the political class, so that even socialists have come to accept that the poor are not helped by taking revenge against the rich, but by opening the doors to social advancement. Since
Roger Scruton
#94. The contradictory nature of the socialist utopias is one explanation of the violence involved in the attempt to impose them: it takes infinite force to make people do what is impossible.
Roger Scruton
#95. In all the areas of life where people have sought and found consolation through forbidding their desires-sex in particular, and taste in general-the habit of judgment is now to be stamped out.
Roger Scruton
#96. While we are familiar with the adverse effect of drink on an empty stomach, we are now witnessing the far worse effect of drink on an empty mind.
Roger Scruton
#97. John O'Sullivan has forcefully argued that the simultaneous presence in the highest offices of Reagan, Thatcher and Pope John Paul II was the cause of the Soviet collapse.
Roger Scruton
#99. In the attacks on the old ways of doing things on word in particular came into currency. That word was "kitsch." Once introduced, the word stuck. Whatever you do, it musn't be kitsch. This became the first precept of the modernist artist in every medium.
Roger Scruton
#100. The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy.
Roger Scruton
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