Scruton Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

Something new seems to be at work in the contemporary world - a process that is eating away the very heart of social life, not merely by putting salesmanship in place of moral virtue, but by putting everything - virtue included - on sale. — 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

GK Chesterton once said that to criticise religion because it leads people to kill each other is like criticising love because it has the same effect. All the best things we have, when abused, will cause bad things to happen. The need for sacrifice, to obey, to make a gift of your life is in all of us and it's a deep thing. In the Islamic world today, people are trying to rejoin themselves to an antiquated and ancient faith and the result is massive violence when they encounter people who have not done that. We'd say that sense of sacrifice is good but only if you're sacrificing your own life; once you sacrifice another's life you've overstepped the mark. — 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

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

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

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

A society governed by consent does not necessarily issue from a social contract, whether actual or implied. It is a society in which dealings between citizens, and between citizens and those in authority, are consensual, in the manner of daily courtesies, games of football, theatrical events or family meals. As Adam Smith made clear, order may emerge from consensual dealings. But it emerges 'by an invisible hand', and not, as a rule, because someone has imposed it. In — Roger Scruton

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

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

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

Our human need for beauty is not simply a redundant addition to the list of human appetites. It is not something that we could lack and still be fulfilled as people. It is a need arising from our metaphysical condition as free individuals, seeking our place in an objective world. — Roger Scruton

The first axiom of Marx Scientist is that everything they tell you is a lie. The second axiom is that it doesn't matter, since you are lying too. The third axiom is 'Kill all liars! — 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

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

Pop pollution has an effect on musical appreciation comparable to pornography on sex. All that is beautiful, special and full of love is replaced by a grinding mechanism. Just as porn addicts lose the capacity for real sexual love, so do pop addicts lose the capacity for genuine musical experience. — 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

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

Realism...is a kind of disappointed tribute to the ideal. — Roger Scruton

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 subject's 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

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

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

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 — Roger Scruton

If you ask a conservative for a statement of his political convictions, he may well say that he has none, and that the greatest heresy of modernity is precisely to see politics as a matter of convictions as though one could recuperate, at the level of political purpose, the consoling certainty which once was granted by religious faith. In another sense, however, conservatism does rest in a system of belief, and is opposed as much to the theory as to the practice of socialist and liberal politics. — Roger Scruton

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

The sexual parts are not only vivid examples of the body's dominion; they are also apertures whose damp emissions and ammoniac smells testify to the mysterious putrefaction of the body. — Roger Scruton

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

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. — 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

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

society is not identical with the state. Society is composed of people, freely associating and forming communities of interest that socialists have no right to control and no authority to outlaw. To — Roger Scruton

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

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

Belief without any practice is of no use to us. But there are two sides to religious practice: one is the ritualistic, which is terribly important to the people engaged in it, and the other is moral, living your life in a better way. You can pray five times a day and still not lead the moral life. We in our communities put more emphasis on the moral life than on ritual. I don't want to say that in order to restore what we need we have to be believers in any strict sense, though I do mourn the loss of the christian faith because I regard it, in some of its better forms, as a relatively peaceful way of giving people access to this idea. — 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

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

We have to take our neighbours seriously, as people with an equal claim to protection, for whom we might be required, in moments of crisis, to face mortal danger. We do this because we believe ourselves to belong together in a shared home. The — Roger Scruton

The contradictory nature of the socialist utopias is one explanation of the violence involved in the attempt to impose them: it takes infinite force to make people do what is impossible. — Roger Scruton

Once we distinguish race and culture, the way is open to acknowledge that not all cultures are equally admirable, and that not all cultures can exist comfortably side by side. To — 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

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

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

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. — 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

Christians have inherited from Saint Augustine and from Plato the vision of this transient world as an icon of another and changeless order. They understand the sacred as a revelation in the here and now of the eternal sense of our being. — Roger Scruton

The goal, Karel said, was not to tell explicit lies but to destroy the distinction between the true and the false, so that lying becomes neither necessary nor possible. — Roger Scruton

It is not the taste considered in itself, that we hold to our lips, and you can no more understand the virtues of a wine through a blind tasting than you could understand the virtues of a woman through a blindfold kiss. — Roger Scruton

Take away religion, take away philosophy, take away the higher aims of art, and you deprive ordinary people of the ways in which they can represent their apartness. Human nature, once something to live up to, becomes something to live down to instead. Biological reductionism nurtures this 'living down', which is why people so readily fall for it. It makes cynicism respectable and degeneracy chic. It abolishes our kind, and with it our kindness. — Roger Scruton

Unlike the Medicare provisions, which were brought in by negotiation between the two principal parties, 'Obamacare' was the initiative of a single party, did not have the consent of the opposition and was concealed within 2,000 pages of legislative jargon that was never properly explained either to the public or to the members of Congress. Not surprisingly, therefore, the legislation has led to a polarization of opinion and a breakdown in the political process, each side claiming to represent the interests of the people, but neither side convinced that 'the people' includes those who did not vote for it. — Roger Scruton

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

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

Strident minorities, acting on the growing disposition to censor their opponents, ensure that the deeper the question, the more likely it is to be settled by shallow arguments. — Roger Scruton

For our ancestors music was something that you sat down to listen to, or which you made for yourself. It was a ceremonial event, in which you participated, either as a passive listener or as an active performer. Either way you were giving and receiving life, sharing in something of great social significance.
With the advent of the gramophone, the radio and now the iPod, music is no longer something that you must make for yourself, nor is it something that you sit down to listen to. It follows you about wherever you go, and you switch it on as a background. It is not so much listened to as overheard. — Roger Scruton

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

When I put my trust in a critic, this is tantamount to saying that I defer to his judgement, even when I have made no judgement of my own. But my own judgement waits upon experience. It is only when I have heard the piece in question, in the moment of appreciation, that my borrowed opinion can actually become a judgement of mine. — 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 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

The market-based legal order of the Brussels bureaucracy helped to fill the legal vacuum created by communism, and was warmly received on that account. But, because of the unwise provisions of the Treaty of Rome regarding freedom of movement, it has led to the mass emigration of the professional classes, and to the loss of the educated young from countries that stand desperately in need of them. The 'enlargement' agenda has therefore become controversial all across Europe, and I return to the controversy in what follows. — Roger Scruton

in a thousand ways people combine not just in circles of friendship but in formal associations, willingly adopting and submitting to rules and procedures that regiment their conduct and make them accountable for doing things correctly. Such associations are a source not only of enjoyment but also of pride: they create hierarchies, offices and rules to which people willingly submit because they can see the point of them. They are also viewed with suspicion by those who believe that civil society should be directed by those who know best. — 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

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

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. — 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

I believed that 'freedom' is not a clear or sufficient answer to the question of what conservatives believe in. Like Matthew Arnold, I held that 'freedom is a very good horse to ride, but to ride somewhere'. — 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

Many people under the influence of science, and particularly neuro-nonsense, will say the sacred is an old concept, it's just a hangover, but you can easily see that's not so, because everyone has a sense of desecration: there are things everybody values which, when they are spoiled are not just moved or destroyed, they are desecrated. Something that is vital not just to you but the world. People have this sense when they see their towns pulled apart and concrete blocks put in the middle of them. You only have to look at Aberdeen to see what happens to a beautiful place when the desecrators get their hands on it. — Roger Scruton

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing is more useful than the useless. — Roger Scruton