Top 100 Scruton Quotes
#1. Roger Scruton is one of our great men of speculation
David Willetts
#2. The problems of philosophy and the systems designed to solve them are formulated in terms which tend to refer, not to the realm of actuality, but to the realms of possibility and necessity: to what might be and what must be, rather than to what is.
Roger Scruton
#3. 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
#4. Music, Schopenhauer wrote, is not unconscious arithmetic, as Leibniz had claimed, but unconscious philosophy, since in music the inner essence of the world, which is will, is made directly present to the mind.
Roger Scruton
#5. There are no chords in modernist architecture, only lines - lines that may come to an end, but that achieve no closure
Roger Scruton
#6. Indeed, the first thing you might learn, in considering jokes, is that Marcel Duchamp's urinal was one - quite a good one the first time around, corny by mid-twentieth century, and downright stupid today.
Roger Scruton
#7. 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
#8. It is to overlook the culture that has focused, down the centuries, on the business of repentance.
Roger Scruton
#9. 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
#10. Wine is not just an object of pleasure, but an object of knowledge; and the pleasure depends on the knowledge.
Roger Scruton
#11. Paul Benacerraf, 'What Numbers Could Not Be,' Philosophical Review (1965).
Roger Scruton
#12. 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
#13. The future of mankind, for the socialist, is simple: pull down the existing order and allow the future to emerge.
Roger Scruton
#14. The sexual parts are not only vivid examples of the body's dominion; they are also apertures whose damp emissions and ammoniac smells testify to the mysterious putrefaction of the body.
Roger Scruton
#15. It is not enough to be nice; you have to be good. We are attracted by nice people; but only on the assumption that their niceness is a sign of goodness.
Roger Scruton
#16. We must not think of this merely as a theological or metaphysical question. For
Roger Scruton
#17. 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
#19. Modernist buildings exclude dialogue, and the void that they create around themselves is not a public space but a desertification
Roger Scruton
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. One thing is immediately apparent, and this is that many statements made in the first-person case are epistemologically privileged.
Roger Scruton
#23. 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
#24. When gifts are replaced by rights, so is gratitude replaced by claims. And claims breed resentment
Roger Scruton
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. But this experience taught me that our civilization cannot survive if we continue to appease the Islamists.
Roger Scruton
#29. Through the pursuit of beauty we shape the world as a home, and in doing so we both amplify our joys and find consolation for our sorrows.
Roger Scruton
#30. The dead and the unborn make their presence known through traditions, institutions, and laws.
Roger Scruton
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. Marriage does not exist for the benefit of the present generation but for the benefit of the next
Roger Scruton
#35. 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
#36. The two most potent post-war orthodoxies
socialist politics and modernist art
have at least one feature in common: they are bothforms of snobbery, the anti-bourgeois snobbery of people convinced of their right to dictate to the common man in the name of the common man.
Roger Scruton
#37. 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
#38. [Burke] emphasized that the new forms of politics, which hope to organize society around the rational pursuit of liberty, equality, fraternity, or their modernist equivalents, are actually forms of militant irrationality.
Roger Scruton
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. Classical buildings endure because they are loved, admired and accepted, and enjoy an innate adaption to human needs and purposes.
Roger Scruton
#43. The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation.
Roger Scruton
#44. 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
#45. Beauty matters. It is not just a subjective thing but a universal need of human beings. If we ignore this need we find ourselves in a spiritual desert.
Roger Scruton
#46. The core of common culture is religion. Tribes survive and flourish because they have gods, who fuse many wills into a single will, and demand and reward the sacrifices on which social life depends.
Roger Scruton
#47. Once we distinguish race and culture, the way is open to acknowledge that not all cultures are equally admirable, and that not all cultures can exist comfortably side by side. To
Roger Scruton
#48. 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
#49. Sometimes the intention is to shock us. But what is shocking first time around is boring and vacuous when repeated.
Roger Scruton
#50. Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter.
Roger Scruton
#51. The ethical life ... is maintained in being by a common culture, which also upholds the togetherness of society ... Unlike the modern youth culture, a common culture sanctifies the adult state, to which it offers rites of passage.
Roger Scruton
#52. When art becomes merely shock value, our sense of humanity is slowly degraded.
Roger Scruton
#53. law of nature that our scientific thinking tends toward the truth, our morality toward the good, and maybe (though he doesn't go this far) our tastes toward the beautiful.
Roger Scruton
#54. Toleration means being prepared to accept opinions that you intensely dislike. Likewise democracy means consenting to be governed by people whom you intensely dislike. This
Roger Scruton
#55. Science proposes something and then does everything it can to disprove it. Religion is not like that. It proposes something and does everything it can to keep it from being disproved.
Roger Scruton
#56. It is not the taste considered in itself, that we hold to our lips, and you can no more understand the virtues of a wine through a blind tasting than you could understand the virtues of a woman through a blindfold kiss.
Roger Scruton
#57. Faith exalts the human heart, by removing it from the market-place, making it sacred and unexchangeable. Under the jurisdiction of religion our deeper feelings are sacralized, so as to become raw material for the ethical life: the life lived in judgement.
Roger Scruton
#58. 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
#59. Political order, in short, requires cultural unity, something that politics itself can never provide.
Roger Scruton
#60. 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
#61. The first effect of modernism was to make high culture difficult: to surround beauty with a wall of erudition.
Roger Scruton
#62. Observing the volatile nature of the new democracies, I came vividly to see how unimportant a part of democracy are elections, in comparison with the enduring institutions and public spirit that make elected politicians accountable.
Roger Scruton
#63. Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch.
Roger Scruton
#64. A philosophy that begins in doubt assails what no-one believes, and invites us to nothing believable
Roger Scruton
#65. Whose freedom, how exercised, how circumscribed and how defined?
Roger Scruton
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. Modernism in architecture went hand in hand with socialist and fascist projects to rid old Europe of its hierarchical past
Roger Scruton
#69. 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
#70. The pageant of a former hour, Is Beauty in the Grave.
Roger Scruton
#71. Free speech is not the cause of the tensions that are growing around us, but the only possible solution to them.
Roger Scruton
#72. 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
#73. Private property is one of the best institutions which has ever evolved, to protect us from the bullying of others.
Roger Scruton
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. Music addresses us from beyond the borders of the natural world
Roger Scruton
#78. [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
#79. Judgement requires, then, the joint operation of sensibility and understanding. A mind without concepts would have no capacity to think; equally, a mind armed with concepts, but with no sensory data to which they could be applied, would have nothing to think about.
Roger Scruton
#80. Art has the ability to redeem life by finding beauty even in the worst aspect of things.
Roger Scruton
#81. 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
#82. When many people individually get what they want, the result may be something they collectively dislike.
Roger Scruton
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. Civilization is always threatened from below, by patterns of belief and emotion that may once have been useful to our ancestors, but that are useful no longer.
Roger Scruton
#86. There is a deep human need for beauty and if you ignore that need in architecture your buildings will not last
Roger Scruton
#87. It is an ancient view that truth, goodness, and beauty cannot, in the end, conflict. Maybe the degeneration of beauty into kitsch comes precisely from the postmodern loss of truthfulness, and with it the loss of moral direction.
Roger Scruton
#88. 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
#89. Ideological opinion is not merely distinct from knowledge but the enemy of knowledge.
Roger Scruton
#90. The music takes over the words and makes them speak to me in another language.
Roger Scruton
#91. 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
#92. In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.
Roger Scruton
#93. society is not identical with the state. Society is composed of people, freely associating and forming communities of interest that socialists have no right to control and no authority to outlaw. To
Roger Scruton
#94. Accountability in public office is but one manifestation of this cultural inheritance, and we should not be surprised that it is the first thing to disappear when the utopians and the planners take over.
Roger Scruton
#95. Something of the child's pure delight in creation survives in every true work of art.
Roger Scruton
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. There is a sort of mystery to kitsch. When did it begin? If it is just simply another name for faking emotions, it ought to have been a permanent part of the human condition.
Roger Scruton
#99. It is only when people have rights of property, and can freely exchange what they own for what they need, that a society of strangers can achieve economic coordination. Socialists
Roger Scruton
#100. 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
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