Roger Scruton Quotes

42 Sourced Quotes

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
Hayek fails to account either for the passion among intellectuals for equality, or for the resulting success of socialists and their egalitarian successors in driving the liberal idea from the stage of politics. This passion for equality is not a new thing, and indeed pre-dates socialism by many centuries, finding its most influential expression in the writings of Rousseau. There is no consensus as to how equality might be achieved, what it would consist in if achieved, or why it is so desirable in the first place. But no argument against the cogency or viability of the idea has the faintest chance of being listened to or discussed by those who have fallen under its spell.

Roger Scruton
The core of common culture is religion. Tribes survive and flourish because they have gods, who fuse many wills into a single will, and demand and reward the sacrifices on which social life depends.

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

Roger Scruton
In 1970s Britain, conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half-mad recluses.

Roger Scruton
Kant's position is extremely subtle — so subtle, indeed, that no commentator seems to agree with any other as to what it is.

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

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

Roger Scruton
All of us need an identity which unites us with our neighbours, our countrymen, those people who are subject to the same rules and the same laws as us, those people with whom we might one day have to fight side by side to protect our inheritance, those people with whom we will suffer when attacked, those people whose destinies are in some way tied up with our own.

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
To teach virtue we must educate the emotions, and this means learning "what to feel" in the various circumstances that prompt them.

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