Roger Scruton quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Roger Scruton on Wise Famous Quotes.

Realism...is a kind of disappointed tribute to the ideal.

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

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

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

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.

Music addresses us from beyond the borders of the natural world

Beauty is assailed from two directions - by the cult of ugliness in the arts, and by the cult of utility in everyday life.

Kant's position is extremely subtle - so subtle, indeed, that no commentator seems to agree with any other as to what it is.

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.

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.

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

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

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

[T]o teach virtue we must educate the emotions, and this means learning "what to feel" in the various circumstances that prompt them.

The great benefit of philosophy, which is also its great weakness, is that all its steps are taken in the spirit of doubt.

The consolation of an imaginary thing is still a real consolation.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Nothing is more useful than the useless.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

was calculated to kill off democracy.

The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation.

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

Whose freedom, how exercised, how circumscribed and how defined?

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The best evidence of a mind is when you change it

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Robert Conquest once announced three laws of politics, the first of which says that everyone is right-wing in the matters he knows about.

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

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

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

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