Roger Scruton Quotes

42 Sourced Quotes

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
Government is the primary need of every man subject to the discipline of social intercourse, and freedom the name of at least one of his anxieties.

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

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

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

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

Roger Scruton
Music addresses us from beyond the borders of the natural world

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

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

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
In literary representation, the distinction between the genuinely erotic and the licentious is a distinction not of subject-matter, but of perspective. The genuinely erotic work is one which invites the reader to re-create in imagination the first-person point of view of someone party to an erotic encounter. The pornographic work retains as a rule the third-person perspective of the voyeuristic observer.

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, 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
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.

Roger Scruton
We yearn, in fact, to justify the human body, to give grounds for our feeling that this is God's image. And in this yearning is expressed our real knowledge that we are our bodies and that they are we.

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

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 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
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.

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

Roger Scruton
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