Roger Scruton Quotes

If you‘re going to have a free economy, one in which the ordinary citizen can dispose of his own income, you’re going to have people who dispose of it in an anti-social way.

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.

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.

One must recognise what all religious people know, which is that human beings are imperfect and fallen and there’s no way in which they alone can surmount the problems which they create.

In art it is always as though the question is what the work of art is really about.

My 2018 ended with a hate storm, in response to my appointment as chair of the government‘s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission.

I know ideals aren’t realities, but they do influence reality – social, legal, political, cultural.

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?

Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.

America has this wonderful ability to recover from its own mistakes, which is why it’s so hugely superior to China.

Lives are destroyed by many things. They are destroyed by anti-racism too, as Ray Honeyford’s was.

Although homosexuality has been normalised, it is not normal.

To live with someone who likes you, and whose judgement you respect, because you love them, does make quite a difference, I find.

Buildings like Penn Station attract our protective instincts not only because of their beauty but because we fear what will come to replace them.

I do ask myself why I make people so enraged, because I only ever say what I think. And while I know it might not be everyone‘s point of view, that doesn’t seem particularly intolerable to me.

There is a chapter in ‘Gentle Regrets‘ called ‘Coming Home‘ which is really me expressing my later admiration for my father‘s public spirit.

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.

Environmental degradation has one cause above all others: the propensity of human beings to take the benefit and leave the costs to someone else, preferably someone far away in space or time, whose protests can be safely ignored.

Conservative voters tend to believe that the ‘climate change‘ agenda has been foisted upon us by an unaccountable lobby of politicised intellectuals.

Perhaps the world of art is just one vast pretence, in which we all take part since, after all, there is no real cost to it, except to those like Charles Saatchi, rich enough to splash out on junk?

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.

Faking is a social activity in which people act together to draw a veil over unwanted realities and encourage each other in the exercise of their illusory powers.

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.

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.

Anyone can lie. One need only have the requisite intention – in other words, to say something with the intention to deceive. Faking, by contrast, is an achievement. To fake things you have to take people in, yourself included.

Wonder and awe are the diet of the artist and without them the world would be far less meaningful to us than it is.

The conservative is the one who understands his own society from within and loves and defends it.

The Marxist theory of ideology is extremely contentious, not least because it is tied to socio-economic hypotheses that are no longer believable.

Life at home wasn’t very good and I had really left by the time I was 16 and didn’t go back until after Cambridge when I went to look after my mother when she was dying.

A reactionary is fixed on the past and wanting to return to it; a conservative wishes to adapt what is best in the past to the changing circumstances of the present.

My life divides into three parts. In the first I was wretched; in the second ill at ease; in the third hunting.

Conservatives hold on to things not only because they are attached to them, but also because they do not see the sense in radical change, until someone has told them what it will lead to.

No, I don’t think I’ve ever really favoured English independence. My view is that if the Scots want to be independent then we should aim for the same thing.

The robust English view used to be that the correct response to offensive words is to ignore them, or to answer them with a rebuke. If you invoke the law at all, it should be to protect the one who gives the offence, and not the one who takes it. Now, it seems, it is all the other way round.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’ve spent my life arguing for greater respect between men and women and anyone who takes the time to read my books or listen to my lectures will realise this.

Delia Smith is, actually, my bete noire. I consider her a most pernicious influence.

When I say there is no such crime as date rape I am saying what is true. There isn’t a specific legal category of date rape and I wanted to make that point in order to ensure that people don’t use this to obscure the difference between real sexual violence and, you know, things that have gone wrong.

I’ve always loved horses.

Conservatives reveal themselves through their care for ordinary human things, and their recognition of the fragility of decency and the need to protect it.

My father was a man of principle who found his principles confirmed in the unremitting failure which they brought on him.

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.

In mathematics and science we solve our problems as well as create them. But in art and philosophy things are not so simple.

Look at what left-wing movements were like in the 19th century – they were all about progress, the engineering of the world, the reshaping of nature, and so on. It’s only postwar, really, that people on the left have come to see the environment as a critical issue.

For two centuries the English countryside has been an icon of national identity and the loved reminder of our island home. Yet the government is bent on littering the hills with wind turbines and the valleys with high speed railways.

Conservatism is about freedom, yes. But it is also about the institutions and attitudes that shape the responsible citizen, and ensure that freedom is a benefit to us all. Conservatism is therefore also about the limits to freedom.

It’s right to flog a dead horse sometimes, when the previous flogging has not annihilated it.

If there’s a local reeling party, I might go to that.

I’ve never been an optimist, but that’s fine because pessimists have the possibility of being agreeably surprised.

Ultimately, political order does not generate itself.

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.

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.

Conservatism, for me, is the philosophy and the politics of attachment.

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.

The true face of religion belongs to the re-enchantment of our injured civilization; faith is a way of filling all the spiritual spaces in our damaged world with the vision of a loving God, the God described in the Qur’an as al-Rahman al-Rahim.

Abstract ideas like equality and liberty have a spurious transparency, and can be used to derive pleasing theorems in the manner of Jean–Jacques Rousseau or John Rawls.