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 dont.The Nature of Philosophy p. 6

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.Culture and Cult p. 5

— Roger Scruton life

The first effect of modernism was to make high culture difficult: to surround beauty with a wall of erudition.Avant-garde and Kitsch p. 85

— Roger Scruton beauty

Without the background of a remembered faith modernism loses its conviction: it becomes routinised. For a long time now it has been assumed that there can be no authentic creation in the sphere of high art which is not is some way a challenge to the ordinary public. Art must give offence, stepping out of the future fully armed against the bourgeois taste for kitsch and cliché. But the result of this is that offence becomes a cliché.Avant-garde and Kitsch p. 86

— Roger Scruton faith

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.Avant-garde and Kitsch p. 91

— Roger Scruton life

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.Idle Hands p. 127

— Roger Scruton life

Hayek’s theory of evolutionary rationality shows how traditions and customs those surrounding sexual relations, for example might be reasonable solutions to complex social problems, even when, and especially when, no clear rational grounds can be provided to the individual for obeying them. These customs have been selected by the ‘‘invisible hand’’ of social reproduction, and societies that reject them will soon enter the condition of ‘‘maladaptation,’’ which is the normal prelude to extinction.

— Roger Scruton sex

Hayek fails to account either for the passion among intellectuals for equality, or for the resulting success of socialists and their egalitarian successors in driving the liberal idea from the stage of politics. This passion for equality is not a new thing, and indeed pre-dates socialism by many centuries, finding its most influential expression in the writings of Rousseau. There is no consensus as to how equality might be achieved, what it would consist in if achieved, or why it is so desirable in the first place. But no argument against the cogency or viability of the idea has the faintest chance of being listened to or discussed by those who have fallen under its spell.

— Roger Scruton writing

Conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this lies the secret of its success.Eliot and Conservatism p. 194

— Roger Scruton success

The conservative response to modernity is to embrace it, but to embrace it critically, in full consciousness that human achievements are rare and precarious, that we have no God-given right to destroy our inheritance, but must always patiently submit to the voice of order, and set an example of orderly living.Eliot and Conservatism p. 208

— Roger Scruton god

The future of mankind, for the socialist, is simple: pull down the existing order and allow the future to emerge.Eliot and Conservatism p. 208

— Roger Scruton future

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.What is Culture? p. 2

— Roger Scruton knowledge

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.What is Culture? p. 2

— Roger Scruton art

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.Knowledge and Feeling p. 35

— Roger Scruton knowledge

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.Rays of Hope p. 106

— Roger Scruton life

Take any aspect of the Western inheritance of which our ancestors were proud, and you will find university courses devoted to deconstructing it. Take any positive feature of our political and cultural inheritance, and you will find concerted efforts in both the media and the academy to place it in quotation marks, and make it look like an imposture or a deceit.p. 40

— Roger Scruton positive

Democracies owe their existence to national loyalties — the loyalties that are supposedly shared by government and opposition, by all political parties, and by the electorate as a whole. Wherever the experience of nationality is weak or non-existent, democracy has failed to take root. For without national loyalty, opposition is a threat to government, and political disagreements create no common ground.

— Roger Scruton art

National loyalty is founded in the love of place, of the customs and traditions that have been inscribed in the landscape and of the desire to protect these good things through a common law and a common loyalty.

— Roger Scruton love

Europe owes its greatness to the fact that the primary loyalties of the European people have been detached from religion and re-attached to the land. Those who believe that the division of Europe into nations has been the primary cause of European wars should remember the devastating wars of religion that national loyalties finally brought to an end. And they should study our art and literature for its inner meaning. In almost every case, they will discover, it is an art and literature not of war but of peace, an invocation of home and the routines of home, of gentleness, everydayness and enduring settlement.

— Roger Scruton religion

National loyalty involves a love of home and a preparedness to defend it; nationalism is a belligerent ideology, which uses national symbols in order to conscript the people to war.

— Roger Scruton love

Never in the history of the world have there been so many migrants. And almost all of them are migrating from regions where nationality is weak or non-existent to the established nation states of the West. They are not migrating because they have discovered some previously dormant feeling of love or loyalty towards the nations in whose territory they seek a home. On the contrary, few of them identify their loyalties in national terms and almost none of them in terms of the nation where they settle. They are migrating in search of citizenship which is the principal gift of national jurisdictions, and the origin of the peace, law, stability and prosperity that still prevail in the West.

— Roger Scruton love

Nationality is not the only kind of social membership, nor is it an exclusive tie. However, it is the only form of membership that has so far shown itself able to sustain a democratic process and a liberal rule of law.

— Roger Scruton self

The idea that the citizen owes loyalty to a country, a territory, a jurisdiction and all those who reside within it — the root assumption of democratic politics, and one that depends upon the nation as its moral foundation - that idea has no place in the minds and hearts of many who now call themselves citizens of European states.

— Roger Scruton politics

Why is it after a century of socialist disasters, and an intellectual legacy that has been time and again exploded, the left-wing position remains, as it were, the default position to which thinking people gravitate when called upon for a comprehensive philosophy? Why are “right-wingers” marginalised in the educational system, denounced in the media and regarded by our political class as untouchable, fit only to clean up after the orgies of luxurious nonsense indulged in by their moral superiors?

— Roger Scruton philosophy

It is a great pity we had only one bottle not enough to revive that proof of the afterlife, though enough to revive some gentle regrets

— Roger Scruton life

Our gardens are symbols of home rather than seduction. Young people with fire in their blood are seldom found in them. The garden is the scene of middle age, of the slow passage from sexual excitement to domestic routine.

— Roger Scruton people

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

— Roger Scruton past

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 funny

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

— Roger Scruton beauty

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 art

In place of the old beliefs of a civilization based on godliness, judgment and historical loyalty, young people are given the new beliefs of a society based on equality and inclusion, and are told that the judgment of other lifestyles is a crime. ... The non-judgmental attitude towards other cultures goes hand-in-hand with a fierce denunciation of the culture that might have been ones own

— Roger Scruton life

The best evidence of a mind is when you change it

— Roger Scruton change

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

— Roger Scruton achieve

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 beauty

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 people

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

— Roger Scruton life

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

— Roger Scruton beauty

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 life

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 truth

There is a crucial distinction to be made between innovation and originality. The second, unlike the first, can never break with what preceded it: to be original, an artist must also belong to the tradition from which he departs. To put it another way, he must violate the expectations of his audience, but he must also, in countless ways, uphold and endorse them.

— Roger Scruton art

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

— Roger Scruton love

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

— Roger Scruton music

State solutions are imposed from above; they are often without corrective devices, and cannot easily be reversed on the proof of failure. Their inflexibility goes hand in hand with their planned and goal-directed nature, and when they fail the efforts of the state are directed not to changing them but to changing people’s belief that they have failed.

— Roger Scruton nature

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

— Roger Scruton marriage

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

— Roger Scruton truth

Fantasy consists in a morbid fascination with unrealities, which secretly transforms itself into a desire to make them real. Imagination is a form of intellectual control, which presents us with the image of unrealities in order that we should understand and feel distanced from them. In imagination we dominate; in fantasy, we are dominated.

— Roger Scruton fantasy

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 life

In our democratic culture people often think it is threatening to judge another persons 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 people

— Roger Scruton life

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 people

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 life

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 beauty

All of us need an identity which unites us with our neighbours, our countrymen, those people who are subject to the same rules and the same laws as us, those people with whom we might one day have to fight side by side to protect our inheritance, those people with whom we will suffer when attacked, those people whose destinies are in some way tied up with our own.

— Roger Scruton people

There’s a real question as to what beauty is and why it’s important to us. Many pseudo-philosophers try to answer these questions and tell us they’re not really answerable. I draw on art and literature, and music in particular, because music is a wonderful example of something that’s in this world but not of this world. Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.

— Roger Scruton art

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

— Roger Scruton space

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 politics

[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 learning

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

— Roger Scruton future

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

— Roger Scruton good

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

— Roger Scruton knowledge

— Roger Scruton god

Cognitive states of mind are seldom addictive, since they depend upon exploration of the world, and the individual encounter with the individual object, whose appeal is outside the subjects control. Addiction arises when the subject has full control over a pleasure and can ponder it at will. It is primarily a matter of sensory pleasure, and involves a kind of short-circuiting of the pleasure network. Addiction is characterized by a loss of the emotional dynamic that would otherwise govern an outward-directed, cognitively creative life.

— Roger Scruton life

It is not the truth of Marxism that explains the willingness of intellectuals to believe it, but the power that it confers on intellectuals, in their attempts to control the world. And since, as Swift says, it is futile to reason someone out of a thing that he was not reasoned into, we can conclude that Marxism owes its remarkable power to survive every criticism to the fact that it is not a truth-directed but a power-directed system of thought.

— Roger Scruton truth

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 light

[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 hope

Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference: beauty demands to be noticed; it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend. If there are people who are indifferent to beauty, then it is surely because they do not perceive it.

— Roger Scruton beauty

Music exists when rhythmic, melodic or harmonic order is deliberately created, and consciously listened to, and it is only language-using, self-conscious creatures ... who are capable of organizing sounds in this way, either when uttering them or when perceiving them. We can hear music in the song of the nightingale, but it is music that no nightingale has heard.

— Roger Scruton music

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 freedom

We should not value education as a means to prosperity, but prosperity as a means to education. Only then will our priorities be right. For education, unlike prosperity is an end in itself. .. power and influence come through the acquisition of useless knowledge. . . irrelevant subjects bring understanding of the human condition, by forcing the student to stand back from it.

— Roger Scruton education

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

— Roger Scruton change

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

— Roger Scruton freedom

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

— Roger Scruton people

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

— Roger Scruton truth

Music addresses us from beyond the borders of the natural world

— Roger Scruton music

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

— Roger Scruton beauty

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 religion

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

— Roger Scruton ignorance

Were we to aim in every case at the kind of supreme beauty exemplified by Sta Maria della Salute, we should end with aesthetic overload. The clamorous masterpieces, jostling for attention side by side, would lose their distinctiveness, and the beauty of each of them would be at war with the beauty of the rest.

— Roger Scruton war

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

— Roger Scruton men

To speak of beauty is to enter another and more exalted realm-a realm sufficiently apart from our everyday concerns as to be mentioned only with a certain hesitation. 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. Somehow, we feel such things should be kept for our exalted moments, and not paraded in company, or allowed to spill out over dinner.

— Roger Scruton faith

In the absence of organized religion, the only vehicle for redemption is art - not just the fragmentary arts of painting or music or poetry, but the kind of art that creates a whole world in itself and in that world we see ourselves reflected and see our religious life perfected.

— Roger Scruton life

Something of the childs pure delight in creation survives in every true work of art.

— Roger Scruton art

Nothing is more useful than the useless.

— Roger Scruton

Unlike every other product that is now manufactured for the table, wine exists in as many varieties as there are people who produce it. Variations in technique, climate, grape, soil and culture ensure that wine is, to the ordinary drinker, the most unpredictable of drinks, and to the connoisseur the most intricately informative, responding to its origins like a game of chess to its opening move.

— Roger Scruton people

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

— Roger Scruton body

— Roger Scruton knowledge

The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation.

— Roger Scruton

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

— Roger Scruton success

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

— Roger Scruton philosophy

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

— Roger Scruton men

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

— Roger Scruton beauty

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

— Roger Scruton men

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

— Roger Scruton lying

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 philosophy

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

— Roger Scruton philosophy

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 beauty

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 art

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 musnt be kitsch. This became the first precept of the modernist artist in every medium.

— Roger Scruton art

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