Roger Scruton Quotes & Sayings

This is possible only if we retain our trust in negotiation and in the sincere desire, among politicians, to compromise with their opponents. Hence in both Britain and America it is necessary for conservatives to defend the politics of compromise, and to protect all those institutions and customs that give a voice to opposition. This — Roger Scruton

Maybe a knowledge of literature and history was of no immediate benefit to a soldier in the ranks during the second world war; without it, however, it would have been impossible for Churchill to exert the kind of leadership that distinguished him, and which aroused even in the most uneducated the sense that far more was at stake than he could easily define. — Roger Scruton

The arguments in favour of offering something to a previously disprivileged group are all very well and they do have weight. But much more important is the effect of this on the institution of marriage. My view is that here we need some serious anthropology. You have to recognise that rites of passage are not personal possessions, they are possessions of the whole community, they are the ways in which the community defines itself and defines its obligation towards the next generation. So you don't make these radical, metaphysical alterations to an institution such as marriage without there being long-term consequences. And nobody seemed to want to talk about the long-term consequences. — Roger Scruton

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

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

was calculated to kill off democracy. — Roger Scruton

There is a particular view, still popular among left-wing intellectuals in the West, that the Soviet system was "socialism gone wrong." This thought expresses precisely the major political danger of our times, which is the belief that politics involves a choice of systems, as a means to an end, so that one system may "go wrong" while another "goes right." The truth is that socialism is wrong, precisely because it believes that it can go right - precisely because it sees politics asa means to an end. Politics is a manner of social existence, whose bedrock is the given obligations from which our social identities are formed. Politics is a form of association which is not a means to an end, but an end in itself. It is founded on legitimacy, and legitimacy resides in our sense that we are made by our inheritance. — Roger Scruton

The very same 'mystery' that veils the human person from the neurophysiologist veils human history from the Marxian determinist and human morality from the sociobiologist. — Roger Scruton

Then there are the fully intentional pleasures, which, although in some way tied up with sensory or perceptual experience, are modes of exploration of the world. Aesthetic pleasures are like this. Aesthetic pleasures are contemplative - they involve studying an object OUTSIDE of the self, to which one is GIVING something (namely, attention and all that flows from it), and not TAKING, as in the pleasure that comes from drugs and drinks. Hence such pleasures are not addictive - there is no pathway to reward that can be short-circuited here, and a serotonin injection is not a cheap way of obtaining the experience of PARISFAL or THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. — Roger Scruton

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 musn't be kitsch. This became the first precept of the modernist artist in every medium. — Roger Scruton

[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

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

In a sense you are always more clearly aware than I can be of what I am in the world; and when I confront my own face, there may be a moment of fear, as I try to fit the person whom I know so well to this thing that others know better — 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

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. There are all sorts of questions like that that which at the periphery of scientic inquiry but which wiggle in the mind like worms: the question "what am I, what is this word 'I'"? Does it refer to anything? If you try to capture the "I", you don't capture it, you capture the object, in which case it's a nothing, but it's a nothing on which everything depends. But this nothing on which everything depends thinks of itself as free. This is a philosophical question that worries everyone, but you can't formulate it. — Roger Scruton

We are needy creatures, and our greatest need is for home - the place where we are, where we find protection and love. We achieve this home through representations of our own belonging, not alone but in conjunction with others. All our attempts to make our surroundings look right - through decorating, arranging, creating - are attempts to extend a welcome to ourselves and to those whom we love. — Roger Scruton

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

The wars of the twentieth century brought home the fundamental truth that people will fight for their country and unite in its defence, but will seldom fight for their class, even when the intellectuals are egging them on. At — Roger Scruton

Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created. — Roger Scruton

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

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

You cannot grant to universities the intellectual freedom that scholarship requires, it is argued, and also deny the moral freedom that enables students to adapt through their own "experiments in living." Freedom is indivisible, and without it knowledge cannot grow.
The problem with that argument is that, outside the natural sciences and a few solid humanities like philosophy and Egyptology, academic freedom is a thing of the past. What is expected of the student in many courses in the humanities and social sciences is ideological conformity, rather than critical appraisal, and censorship has become accepted as a legitimate part of the academic way of life. — Roger Scruton

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

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

Religion, for Father Pavel, involved no escape from the natural into the supernatural, no repudiation of this world for the sake of a better one whose unreality made it more malleable to our wishes. In his perspective, the natural and the supernatural were one and the same: the world became transparent, with the light of eternity shining from the other side. — Roger Scruton

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. — Roger Scruton

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

The sense of beauty puts a brake upon destruction, by representing its object as irreplaceable. When the world looks back at me with my eyes, as it does in aesthetic experience, it is also addressing me in another way. Something is being revealed to me, and I am being made to stand still and absorb it. It is of course nonsense to suggest that there are naiads in the trees and dryads in the groves. What is revealed to me in the experience of beauty is a fundamental truth about being - the truth that being is a gift, and receiving it is a task. This is a truth of theology that demands exposition as such. — 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

Truth arises by an invisible hand from our many errors, and both error and truth must be protected. The heretic, however, is now exposed to public intimidation and abuse on a scale inconceivable before the invention of the internet.
Of course, we have moved on a bit from the Middle Ages. It is not the man who is assassinated now, but only his character. But the effect is the same. Free discussion is being everywhere shut down, so that we will never know who is right - the heretics, or those who try to silence them. — Roger Scruton

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

Observing the volatile nature of the new democracies, I came vividly to see how unimportant a part of democracy are elections, in comparison with the enduring institutions and public spirit that make elected politicians accountable. — Roger Scruton

One of the great gifts of the Enlightenment is that we can form communities without necessaily agreeing on ultimate metaphysical grounds. We know that to a great extent that the principles of social coordination are manmade, we recognise the right of the other to exist. This is something that distinguishes our part of the world from the middle East. — Roger Scruton

In a moment of doubt about the socialist record Eric Hobsbawm once wrote: 'If the left have to think more seriously about the new society, that does not make it any the less desirable or necessary or the case against the present one any less compelling.'1 There, in a nutshell, is the sum of the New Left's commitment. We know nothing of the socialist future, save only that it is both necessary and desirable. Our concern is with the 'compelling' case against the present, which leads us to destroy what we lack the knowledge to replace. — Roger Scruton

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

We believe that if the argument for equality has merit, it does so because it protects difference. Equality used to allow those who differ not to subsume themselves under another's identity but to claim equity for their distinction and the State's protection in maintaining and even defending it. Now, however, equality is being used to erase difference, destroy institutional distinction and remove proper and plural provision for different groups, faiths and organisations ... What is needed here is equity that respects difference not equality that destroys it. — Roger Scruton

In discussing tradition, we are not discussing arbitrary rules and conventions. We are discussing answers that have been discovered to enduring questions. These — Roger Scruton

Wanting it for its beauty is not wanting to inspect it: it is wanting to contemplate it - and that is something more than a search for information or an expression of appetite. Here is a want without a goal: a desire that cannot be fulfilled since there is nothing that would count as its fulfilment. — Roger Scruton

Nonsemes and mathemes stand next to each other in detached and mutually irrelevant jumbles. They lack the crucial valency that ties sentence to sentence in a truth-directed argument or formula to formula in a valid proof, and they can accumulate forever without getting to the point of saying or revealing what they mean. — Roger Scruton

Had Heidegger attached his great ego to the cause of international socialism, he would have enjoyed the whitewash granted to Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Hobsbawm and the other apologists for the Gulag.1 But the cause of national socialism could enjoy no such convenient excuse, and the sin was compounded, in Heidegger's case, by the fact that it was precisely the national, rather than the socialist aspect of the creed that had attracted him. — Roger Scruton

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 one's own — Roger Scruton

Human beings, in their settled condition, are animated by oikophilia: the love of the oikos, which means not only the home but the people contained in it, and the surrounding settlements that endow that home with lasting contours and an enduring smile. — Roger Scruton

We should reject the view that high culture, as the possession of an elite, is of no use to those who don't possess it. This is as false as the view that science or higher mathematics are useless to those who don't understand them. Scientific knowledge exists because a few talented people are prepared to devote their energy to pursuing it. That is what a university is for: and since you cannot pass on difficult knowledge without discriminating between the students who can absorb it and those who cannot, discrimination is a social good. The same is true of high culture. Those able to acquire it will be a minority and the process of cultural transmission will be critically impeded if that teacher must teach Mozart and Lady Gaga side by side to satisfy some egalitarian agenda. — 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

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

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

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

It is only when people have rights of property, and can freely exchange what they own for what they need, that a society of strangers can achieve economic coordination. Socialists — Roger Scruton

The relation of the soul to the body is like that of a house to its bricks. The soul is a principle of organisation, which governs the flesh and endows it with meaning. It is no more separable from the flesh than is the house from its bricks, even if the soul may survive the gradual replacement of every bodily part. — Roger Scruton

The love of beauty is really a signal to free ourselves from that sensory attachment, and to begin the ascent of the soul towards the world of ideas, there to participate in the divine version of reproduction, which is the understanding and the passing on of eternal truths. — 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

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

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

For Newman a university does not exist simply to convey information or expertise. The university is a society in which the student absorbs the graces and accomplishments of a higher form of life. In the university, according to Newman, the pursuit of truth and the active discussion of its meaning are integrated into a wider culture, in which the ideal of the gentleman is acknowledged as the standard. The gentleman does not merely know things; he is receptive to the tone, the meaning, the lived reality of what he knows. — Roger Scruton

the growing materialism of our societies. This materialism informs political discourse at every level, making wealth and its distribution the only issue that is discussed for long. As a result, people think of conservatism merely as a form of complacency towards the current system of material rewards, which has nothing whatever to say about the things that 'money can't buy', or about the effect of the consumer society on our deeper values. Yet — Roger Scruton

Individuals in Western states are sovereign over their own households; they enjoy consumer sovereignty through the market and political sovereignty through elections. — 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

Left-wing politics has discarded the revolutionary paradigm advanced by the New Left, in favour of bureaucratic routines and the institutionalization of the welfare culture. The two goals of liberation and social justice remain in place: but they are promoted by legislation, committees and government commissions empowered to root out the sources of discrimination. Liberation and social justice have been bureaucratized. — Roger Scruton

England for him was no longer a real place, but a consecrated isle in the lake of forgetting, where the God of the English still strode through an imaginary Eden, admiring His works. — Roger Scruton

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

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

a free economy is an economy run by free beings. And free beings are responsible beings. Economic transactions in a regime of private property depend not only on distinguishing mine from yours, but also on relating me to you. Without accountability, nobody is to be trusted, and without trust the virtues that are attributed to the free economy would not arise. Every — Roger Scruton

Moreover, since it is in the nature of tastes to differ, how can a standard erected by one person's taste be used to cast judgement on another's? How, for example, can we pretend that one type of music is superior or inferior to another when comparative judgements merely reflect the taste of the one who makes them? — Roger Scruton

The magical encounter with the Beethoven quartet, the Bach suite, the Brahms symphony, in which your whole being is gripped by melodic and harmonic ideas and taken on a journey through the imaginary space of music - that experience which lies at the heart of our civilisation and which is an incomparable source of joy and consolation to all those who know it - is no longer a universal resource. It has become a private eccentricity, something that a dwindling body of oldies cling to, but which is regarded by many of the young as irrelevant. Increasingly young ears cannot reach out to this enchanted world, and therefore turn away from it. The loss is theirs, but you cannot explain that to them, any more than you can explain the beauty of colours to someone who is congenitally blind. — Roger Scruton

In The Theory of the Moral Sentiments, Smith emphasized that trust, responsibility and accountability exist only in a society that respects them, and only where the spontaneous fruit of human sympathy is allowed to ripen. It is where sympathy, duty and virtue achieve their proper place that self-interest leads, by an invisible hand, to a result that benefits everyone. And this means that people can best satisfy their interests only in a context where they are also on occasion moved to renounce them. Beneath every society where self-interest pays off, lies a foundation of self-sacrifice. — Roger Scruton

Music, Schopenhauer wrote, is not unconscious arithmetic, as Leibniz had claimed, but unconscious philosophy, since in music the inner essence of the world, which is will, is made directly present to the mind. — Roger Scruton

Beauty is not the source of disinterested pleasure, but simply the object of a universal interest: the interest that we have in beauty, and in the pleasure that beauty brings. — Roger Scruton

The fictions were far more persuasive than the facts, and more persuasive than both was the longing to be caught up in a mass movement of solidarity, with the promise of emancipation at the end. My father's grievances were real and well founded. But his solutions were dreams. — Roger Scruton

Locke's essay on Toleration of 1689 argued for the toleration of opinions and ways of life with which you do not agree, as one of the virtues of a liberal society. But many who call themselves liberal today seem to have little understanding of what this virtue really is. Toleration does not mean renouncing all opinions that others might find offensive. It does not mean an easy-going relativism or a belief that 'anything goes'. On the contrary, it means accepting the right of others to think and act in ways of which you disapprove. It means being prepared to protect people from negative discrimination even when you hate what they think and what they feel. But — Roger Scruton

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

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. — Roger Scruton

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

Its true that we learn a lot from science about how we function but there's a danger in thinking knowledge of how we function is the full account of what we are. If you're a chemist who is really interested in the optical properties of certain pigments you could analyse the Mona Lisa and describe it completely but you would never have mentioned the face, which is the meaning of this thing. In that way a neuroscientist can put together an enormously impressively picture of the brain but he would not have described what goes on when we react to another person. — Roger Scruton

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. — Roger Scruton

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

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

If we cannot justify the very concept of the aesthetic, except as ideology, then aesthetic judgement is without philosophical foundation. An 'ideology' is adopted for its social or political utility, rather than its truth. And — Roger Scruton

The most important political effect of this displacement of civil by enterprise association has been the gradual loss of authority and decision-making from the bottom of society, and its transfer to the top. If you supply society with a dynamic purpose, especially one conceived in these linear terms, as moving always forwards towards greater equality, greater justice, greater prosperity or, in the case of the EU, 'ever closer union', you at the same time license the would-be leaders. You give credentials to those who promise to guide society along its allotted path, and you confer on them the authority to conscript, dictate, organize and punish the rest of us, regardless of how we might otherwise wish to lead our lives. In particular, you authorize the invasion of those institutions and associations that form the heart of civil society, in order to impose on them a direction and a goal that may have nothing to do with their intrinsic nature. — Roger Scruton

The identification of any object in the first-person case is ruled out by the enterprise of scientific explanation. So science cannot tell me who I am, let alone where, when, or how. — Roger Scruton

When, in the works of Lacan, Deleuze and Althusser, the nonsense machine began to crank out its impenetrable sentences, of which nothing could be understood except that they all had "capitalism" as their target, it looked as though Nothing had at last found its voice. — Roger Scruton

Jack regarded himself as locked in a lifelong struggle with this establishment, on behalf of the Anglo-Saxon peasantry whose birthright had been stolen a thousand years earlier by the Norman knights. — Roger Scruton

Liberty is not the same thing as equality, and that those who call themselves liberals are far more interested in equalizing than in liberating their fellows. — Roger Scruton

Corbyn was not elected by the parliamentary party but by people who have the luxury of sounding off without the responsibility of answering for it. Corbyn represents the idiocy of direct democracy, and the culture of resentment that takes advantage of it. — Roger Scruton

The question of maintaining a serious moral order while allowing economic freedom has, I think, troubled people right from the beginning of history, and has always been a tension within conservative thinkers, going right back to [Edmund] Burke. The traditional way of reconciling these two things was through religion, which would remove certain things from the market. Sex is removed from the market and made into a religious ceremony, and parent-child relations, education, etc. I think that's the great benefit that religion has deferred on people down the centuries. Take it away now and we don't know quite what's going to happen. — 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

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

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

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

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

Given that Europe's legacy to the world consists in the two great goods of Christianity and democracy it is hardly surprising if the EU no longer has the endorsement of the European people, even if it has created a network of clients upon whose support it can always rely. — Roger Scruton

Toleration means being prepared to accept opinions that you intensely dislike. Likewise democracy means consenting to be governed by people whom you intensely dislike. This — Roger Scruton

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

At the same time, instead of limiting the power of the state, alleged human rights have begun to enhance that power, and to bring the state into all our disputes on the side of the favoured party. Rights, — Roger Scruton

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 ... 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

By living in a spirit of forgiveness we not only uphold the core value of citizenship but also find the path to social membership that we need. Happiness does not come from the pursuit of pleasure, nor is it guaranteed by freedom, it comes from sacrifice. That is the message of the christian religion and it is the message that is conveyed by all the memorable works of our culture. It is the message that has been lost in the noise of repudiation, but which it seems to me can be heard once again if we devote our energies to retrieving it. And in the christian tradition the primary act of sacrifice is forgiveness. The one who forgives sacrifices vengeance and renounces thereby a part of himself for the sake of another. — Roger Scruton

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