Top 187 Quotes & Sayings by Roger Scruton
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English philosopher Roger Scruton.
Last updated on December 3, 2024.
A reactionary is fixed on the past and wanting to return to it; a conservative wishes to adapt what is best in the past to the changing circumstances of the present.
Conservatism is about freedom, yes. But it is also about the institutions and attitudes that shape the responsible citizen, and ensure that freedom is a benefit to us all. Conservatism is therefore also about the limits to freedom.
Abstract ideas like equality and liberty have a spurious transparency, and can be used to derive pleasing theorems in the manner of Jean-Jacques Rousseau or John Rawls.
No, I don't think I've ever really favoured English independence. My view is that if the Scots want to be independent then we should aim for the same thing.
The real cure to immigration, obviously, is to make sure that there is prosperity around the world so that people don't have the motive. Not just prosperity, but freedom.
Conservatism, for me, is the philosophy and the politics of attachment.
My life divides into three parts. In the first I was wretched; in the second ill at ease; in the third hunting.
For two centuries the English countryside has been an icon of national identity and the loved reminder of our island home. Yet the government is bent on littering the hills with wind turbines and the valleys with high speed railways.
There has been throughout this country and throughout Europe really an attempt silence the conservative voice. We get identified, caricatured and then demonised and made to look as though we are some kind of sinister, fascist, racist kind of people.
I am a conservative thinker, well known as such, outspoken as such but reasonable in my view.
Conservatives reveal themselves through their care for ordinary human things, and their recognition of the fragility of decency and the need to protect it.
Each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one and that is a very frightening thing.
I've always taken the view that works of art are not just things that we enjoy. They can convey truths about the world more vividly and to greater effect than ordinary philosophical prose can because they don't just deal in ideas but show the emotional reality of them.
Delia Smith is, actually, my bete noire. I consider her a most pernicious influence.
What makes a politician accountable is not that there are millions of people who vote, but that there are procedures of government that force him to account for himself.
Conservative voters tend to believe that the 'climate change' agenda has been foisted upon us by an unaccountable lobby of politicised intellectuals.
Certainly the multicultural activists in the Labour party and the universities wanted to destroy the old white Anglo-Saxon education system as they saw it, and produce something completely different - with no conception of what that completely different thing would be, of course.
When I say there is no such crime as date rape I am saying what is true. There isn't a specific legal category of date rape and I wanted to make that point in order to ensure that people don't use this to obscure the difference between real sexual violence and, you know, things that have gone wrong.
If you're going to have a free economy, one in which the ordinary citizen can dispose of his own income, you're going to have people who dispose of it in an anti-social way.
Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude.
A lot of the Qur'an is, frankly, cantankerous, vitriolic, man-hating stuff.
My 2018 ended with a hate storm, in response to my appointment as chair of the government's Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission.
Faking is a social activity in which people act together to draw a veil over unwanted realities and encourage each other in the exercise of their illusory powers.
Anyone can lie. One need only have the requisite intention - in other words, to say something with the intention to deceive. Faking, by contrast, is an achievement. To fake things you have to take people in, yourself included.
My father was a man of principle who found his principles confirmed in the unremitting failure which they brought on him.
The Marxist theory of ideology is extremely contentious, not least because it is tied to socio-economic hypotheses that are no longer believable.
The rude, raw, 'let it all hang out' freedom of the Californian hippies was in fact the most censorious and oppressive of societies that I have encountered.
Cameron's resignation really was the death knell of the Conservative Party as we knew it because that's something a proper Conservative politician cannot do: renounce leadership at the moment when it's needed.
The sanctity of private property is so fundamental a part of the American settlement that the country's conservatives look with suspicion on any policy that seems to prevent people from doing what they will with what is theirs.
I know ideals aren't realities, but they do influence reality - social, legal, political, cultural.
18th century opera is packed with emotion, but contains not a trace of kitsch. Only with the 'thees' and 'thous' of Victorian poetry does the disease begin to grow in our poetic tradition.
America is the one place where you can talk of 'this nation' and everyone knows exactly what you think. People put a flag on their porch, and they do have a desire to localize everything and celebrate things locally.
If you say something in advance - if you describe a problem as it arises, people always turn on you because they don't want to hear about it. But when it's too late to do anything, they will then turn around and say that you were right. That's human nature.
Given the right to - given the opportunity to vote, I voted for Brexit because I've never approved really of the European Union, I never approved of it because of its attempts to confiscate national sovereignty in all the issues that matter.
When a woman cries date rape what she means is the whole thing went too quickly.
All political order presupposes a pre-political order, a sense that people belong together. And then, of course, they might seek a contract that embodies their togetherness. But the togetherness has to be there.
The conservative is the one who understands his own society from within and loves and defends it.
One must recognise what all religious people know, which is that human beings are imperfect and fallen and there's no way in which they alone can surmount the problems which they create.
Lives are destroyed by many things. They are destroyed by anti-racism too, as Ray Honeyford's was.
What the word conservative means is not putting things back but conserving them. There are things that are threatened and you love them, so you want to keep them.
Of course, it is the case that conservatism as I envisage it distances itself always from abstract conceptions and tries to find the concrete reality.
Life at home wasn't very good and I had really left by the time I was 16 and didn't go back until after Cambridge when I went to look after my mother when she was dying.
Ultimately, political order does not generate itself.
The traditional family has an intrinsic as well as an instrumental value, and that is the real reason so many conservatives defend it.
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.
Environmental degradation has one cause above all others: the propensity of human beings to take the benefit and leave the costs to someone else, preferably someone far away in space or time, whose protests can be safely ignored.
But the European Union does not have a concept of national identity. It was set up to abolish that idea, not to abolish German national identity because that was trying to save itself.
Nothing upset me more than the award of Companion of Honour to Eric Hobsbawm in reward for a lifetime of unswerving loyalty to the Soviet Union.
I've always loved horses.
The Scottish desire for independence is, to some extent, a fabrication. They want to identify themselves as Scots but still to be part of a, to enjoy the subsidy they get from being part of the kingdom.
To live with someone who likes you, and whose judgement you respect, because you love them, does make quite a difference, I find.
I've never been an optimist, but that's fine because pessimists have the possibility of being agreeably surprised.
It is scarcely a mark of intellectual profundity to have noticed that our society is big.
I do ask myself why I make people so enraged, because I only ever say what I think. And while I know it might not be everyone's point of view, that doesn't seem particularly intolerable to me.
Fashion makes me laugh.
Whether it is a garden gnome, the sound of Bing Crosby launching into 'White Christmas', the blinking innocent eyes of Bambi or the words of Patience Strong, the kitsch phenomenon is there as strong and recognisable as your mother's face. You seldom if ever have the question, whether this is kitsch or not. If you think it might be, then it is.
I'm a hate figure for a certain kind of half-educated politically correct person.
On the whole, I rather disapprove of cookbooks, except for the literary ones, like Elizabeth David's.
I've spent my life arguing for greater respect between men and women and anyone who takes the time to read my books or listen to my lectures will realise this.
There is a chapter in 'Gentle Regrets' called 'Coming Home' which is really me expressing my later admiration for my father's public spirit.
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