QUOTES by Roger Scruton
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Conservatives reveal themselves through their care for ordinary human things, and their recognition of the fragility of decency and the need to protect it.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
Each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one and that is a very frightening thing.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
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.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
For Conservatives, all disputes over law, liberty and justice are addressed to a historic and existing community. The root of politics, they believe, is attachment - the motive in human beings that binds them to the place, the customs, the history and the people who are theirs.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
I think that, on the whole, risk-taking entrepreneurial characters regard nature as a sort of background that we can use for our own advantage.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
I know ideals aren't realities, but they do influence reality - social, legal, political, cultural.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
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.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
I'm a hate figure for a certain kind of half-educated politically correct person.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
It's right to flog a dead horse sometimes, when the previous flogging has not annihilated it.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
Delia Smith is, actually, my bete noire. I consider her a most pernicious influence.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
In the traditional dances, physical contact was permitted in a way that it wasn't in everyday life. The electricity of physical contact has gone therefore from young people's lives.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
The language of politics is spoken in the first-person plural, and for Conservatives, the duty of the politician is to maintain that first-person plural in being.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
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.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
There is a chapter in 'Gentle Regrets' called 'Coming Home' which is really me expressing my later admiration for my father's public spirit.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
Wonder and awe are the diet of the artist and without them the world would be far less meaningful to us than it is.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
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.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
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.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
When a woman cries date rape what she means is the whole thing went too quickly.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
Like every other viable environmental policy, the search for clean energy begins at home.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
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.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
My own view is that left-wing positions largely come about from resentment - I agree with Nietzsche about this - a resentment about the surrounding social order. They have privileges, I don't. Or, I have them and I can't live up to them.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
Politics is a matter of day-to-day improvisation, and it often seems as though the major parties are guided only by the desire to stay in office and not by any philosophy that might justify their doing so.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
The conservative is the one who understands his own society from within and loves and defends it.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
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.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
We live in an extremely anxious age in which the core of our beliefs has been undermined to a great extent by scientific thinking.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
The traditional family has an intrinsic as well as an instrumental value, and that is the real reason so many conservatives defend it.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
We should make the case for the things we love, even if we think that people will misunderstand them. That is why people defend the U.S. Constitution, even though so few really understand the subtle thinking embodied in that document.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
In art it is always as though the question is what the work of art is really about.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
There are big questions science doesn't answer, such as why is there something rather than nothing? There can't be a scientific answer to that because it's the answer that precedes science.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
Morality is like a field of flowers beneath which the corpses are piled in a thousand layers. It is an evolved mechanism whereby the human organism proceeds through life sustained on every side by bonds of mutual interest.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
In mathematics and science we solve our problems as well as create them. But in art and philosophy things are not so simple.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
A high culture is the self-consciousness of a society. It contains the works of art, literature, scholarship and philosophy that establish a shared frame of reference among educated people.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
To people like me, educated in post-war Britain, free speech has been a firm premise of the British way of life.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
My father was a man of principle who found his principles confirmed in the unremitting failure which they brought on him.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
Under the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006, it is an offence to stir up hatred towards religious and racial groups. 'Stirring up hatred' is an expression both loaded and undefined. Do I stir up hatred towards a religious group by criticising its beliefs in outspoken terms?
Quote by -Roger Scruton
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.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
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.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
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.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
The main aim of conservative politicians is to get through to the next election without being noticed. Nothing is more embarrassing to them than a person who claims not only to share their beliefs but also to be inclined to put them into practice.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
I've never been an optimist, but that's fine because pessimists have the possibility of being agreeably surprised.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
One of the questions that has most bothered me in my reflections on culture is the question of kitsch. Just what is it? When did it begin? And why?
Quote by -Roger Scruton
To live with someone who likes you, and whose judgement you respect, because you love them, does make quite a difference, I find.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
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.
Quote by -Roger Scruton