Roger Scruton Quotes: top 72 famous quotes about Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton Quotes & Sayings

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Realism...is a kind of disappointed tribute to the ideal. — Roger Scruton

The greatest modern philosopher was moved by nothing more than by duty. His life, in consequence, was unremarkable. — Roger Scruton

Like adverts, today's works of art aim to create a brand, even if they have no product to sell except themselves. — Roger Scruton

Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter. — Roger Scruton

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

Music addresses us from beyond the borders of the natural world — Roger Scruton

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

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

People who are always in praise and pursuit of the beautiful are an embarrassment, like people who make a constant display of their religious faith. — Roger Scruton

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

Sometimes the intention is to shock us. But what is shocking first time around is boring and vacuous when repeated. — Roger Scruton

A society no more exists for the satisfaction of human needs, than a plant exists for its own health. — Roger Scruton

Being unpopular is never easy; but being unpopular in a good cause is a shield against despair. — Roger Scruton

[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

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

The consolation of an imaginary thing is still a real consolation. — Roger Scruton

In 1970s Britain, conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half-mad recluses. — Roger Scruton

A philosophy that begins in doubt assails what no-one believes, and invites us to nothing believable — Roger Scruton

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

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

Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it. — Roger Scruton

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

Styles may change, details may come and go, but the broad demands of aesthetic judgement are permanent. — Roger Scruton

The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy. — Roger Scruton

In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel. — Roger Scruton

Nothing is more useful than the useless. — Roger Scruton

Conservatives resonate to Burke's view of society, as a partnership between the living, the unborn and the dead. — Roger Scruton

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

One thing is immediately apparent, and this is that many statements made in the first-person case are epistemologically privileged. — Roger Scruton

The music takes over the words and makes them speak to me in another language. — Roger Scruton

A philosopher who says, 'There are no truths, only interpretations,' risks the retort: 'Is that true, or only an interpretation?' — Roger Scruton

Paul Benacerraf, 'What Numbers Could Not Be,' Philosophical Review (1965). — Roger Scruton

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

The future of mankind, for the socialist, is simple: pull down the existing order and allow the future to emerge. — Roger Scruton

We must not think of this merely as a theological or metaphysical question. For — Roger Scruton

was calculated to kill off democracy. — Roger Scruton

The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation. — Roger Scruton

Something of the child's pure delight in creation survives in every true work of art. — Roger Scruton

Whose freedom, how exercised, how circumscribed and how defined? — Roger Scruton

Marriage does not exist for the benefit of the present generation but for the benefit of the next — Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton is one of our great men of speculation — David Willetts

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

The art establishment has turned away from the old curriculum which puts beauty and craft at the top of the agenda. — Roger Scruton

When many people individually get what they want, the result may be something they collectively dislike. — Roger Scruton

Private property is one of the best institutions which has ever evolved, to protect us from the bullying of others. — Roger Scruton

The best evidence of a mind is when you change it — Roger Scruton

Through sacred things we can influence and be influenced by the transcendental. — Roger Scruton

Modernist buildings exclude dialogue, and the void that they create around themselves is not a public space but a desertification — Roger Scruton

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

Modernism in architecture went hand in hand with socialist and fascist projects to rid old Europe of its hierarchical past — Roger Scruton

Free speech is not the cause of the tensions that are growing around us, but the only possible solution to them. — Roger Scruton

Art has the ability to redeem life by finding beauty even in the worst aspect of things. — Roger Scruton

Wine is not just an object of pleasure, but an object of knowledge; and the pleasure depends on the knowledge. — Roger Scruton

Ideological opinion is not merely distinct from knowledge but the enemy of knowledge. — Roger Scruton

There is a deep human need for beauty and if you ignore that need in architecture your buildings will not last — Roger Scruton

Classical buildings endure because they are loved, admired and accepted, and enjoy an innate adaption to human needs and purposes. — Roger Scruton

When truth cannot make itself known in words, it will make itself known in deeds. — Roger Scruton

But this experience taught me that our civilization cannot survive if we continue to appease the Islamists. — Roger Scruton

Political order, in short, requires cultural unity, something that politics itself can never provide. — Roger Scruton

Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch. — Roger Scruton

Concerning no subject would [George Bernard] Shaw be deterred by the minor accident of total ignorance from penning a definitive opinion. — Roger Scruton

If you consider only utility, the things you build will soon be useless ... nobody wants to be in it. — Roger Scruton

The first effect of modernism was to make high culture difficult: to surround beauty with a wall of erudition. — Roger Scruton

The dead and the unborn make their presence known through traditions, institutions, and laws. — Roger Scruton

Conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this lies the secret of its success. — Roger Scruton

There are no chords in modernist architecture, only lines - lines that may come to an end, but that achieve no closure — Roger Scruton

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

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

When art becomes merely shock value, our sense of humanity is slowly degraded. — Roger Scruton

When gifts are replaced by rights, so is gratitude replaced by claims. And claims breed resentment — Roger Scruton

The pageant of a former hour, Is Beauty in the Grave. — Roger Scruton

It is to overlook the culture that has focused, down the centuries, on the business of repentance. — Roger Scruton