Famous quotes

Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide

English Italiano Polski עברית Français Português فارسی Español 中文 Русский Deutsch العربية हिन्दी 日本語 Ελληνικά Latina

Roger Scruton

77 quotes

“It goes without saying that apartheid is offensive. It was adopted, however, as the lesser of two evils. The Afrikaners believe that black majority rule has, in almost every case, led to the collapse of the constitutional government which they brought to South Africa, and upon which their freedoms and privileges – and perhaps even their lives – depend. And it did not seem so very bad to deny to blacks a vote which they would, when in power, promptly deny to themselves.”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 'A lift at last for the other Afrikaners', The Times (17 May 1983), p. 12
“A developed legal system, with elaborate common law rights, and supported by a system of natural justice, was the most precious legacy of our empire. If it were still permissible to defend colonization, I should justify it in terms of this bequest, and at the same time contrast the colonization of Africa with the Soviet "colonization" of eastern Europe, which has advanced not by the generation but by the destruction of law.”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 'A colonial inheritance once again cast off', The Times (6 September 1983), p. 10
“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 (1944–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Of course, there are those — Sandel, Walzer and Dworkin, for example — who propose "communitarian" ways of thinking, as a further move in the direction which a sophisticated liberalism requires. But none of them is prepared to accept the real price of community: which is sanctity, intolerance, exclusion, and a sense that life's meaning depends upon obedience, and also on vigilance against the enemy.”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 'In Defence of the Nation', The Philosopher on Dover Beach (1990), p. 310
“An international socialism is the stated ideal of most socialists; an international liberalism is the unstated tendency of the liberal. To neither system is it thinkable that men live, not by universal aspirations but by local attachments; not by a “solidarity” that stretches across the globe from end to end, but by obligations that are understood in terms which separate men from most of their fellows—in terms such as national history, religion, language, and the customs that provide the basis of legitimacy.”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: How to be a Non-Liberal, Anti-Socialist Conservative", Intercollegiate Review: A Journal of Scholarship and Opinion (Spring 1993)
“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 (1944–2020) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Do the Right Thing", in Ian Christie and Lindsay Nash, eds., The Good Life (UK: Demos, 1998), p. 51
“Yes, I am in favor of censorship, but it has to be conducted by people like me. And that's the difficulty (laughs). I'm in favor of encouraging every possible form of self-restraint and parental control. And I certainly don't think that pornography should be protected under the American Constitution.”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview by Salon; reported in "Notable & Quotable", The Wall Street Journal (22 April 1998)
“The modern world gives proof at every point that it is far easier to destroy institutions than to create them. Nevertheless, few people seem to understand this truth.”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Rousseau & the origins of liberalism", The New Criterion (October 1998)
“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 (1944–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1944–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A postmodern rural consultancy”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On his business, Horsell's Farm Enterprises. Interview by Luke Bretherton, "Right Out of Fashion", Third Way (April 2001), p. 16
“There is no doubt in my mind that, from the third-person point of view, monarchy is the most reasonable form of government. By embodying the state in a fragile human person, it captures the arbitrariness and the givenness of political allegiance, and so transforms allegiance into affection.”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Meaning of Conservatism, 3rd ed. (2001), p. 193
“In 1970s Britain, conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half-mad recluses.”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Why I became a conservative", The New Criterion (February 2003)
“[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 (1944–2020) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Why I became a conservative", The New Criterion (February 2003)
“The strange superstition has arisen in the Western world that we can start all over again, remaking human nature, human society, and the possibilities of happiness; as though the knowledge and experience of our ancestors were now entirely irrelevant.”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life (2005)
“When truth cannot make itself known in words, it will make itself known in deeds.”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Should he have spoken?", The New Criterion (September 2006), p. 22; also in The Roger Scruton Reader (2009) edited by Mark Dooley
“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 (1944–2020) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Hayek and conservatism", in Edward Feser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hayek (2006)
“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 (1944–2020) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Rivers of Blood, BBC2 documentary (8 March 2008)
“I don't think you can be a conservative in the end without being some kind of nationalist. You are always going to have in the back of your mind a conception of the community whose structure you are trying to retain.”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Richard English and Richard Hayton in London (25 June 2008), quoted in Richard English, Richard Hayton and Michael Kenny, 'Englishness and the Union in Contemporary Conservative Thought', Government and O…
“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 (1944–2020) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Limits of Liberty", The American Spectator (December 2008)
“A free society is a community of free beings, bound by the laws of sympathy and by the obligations of family love. It is not a society of people released from all moral constraint–for that is precisely the opposite of a society. Without moral constraint there can be no cooperation, no family commitment, no long-term prospects, no hope of economic, let alone social, order.”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Limits of Liberty", The American Spectator (December 2008)
“Styles may change, details may come and go, but the broad demands of aesthetic judgement are permanent.”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Some pages from Marie-Joseph Peyre's Roman album", in Frank Salmon, ed., The Persistence of the Classical: Essays on Architecture Presented to David Watkin (2008), p. 68
“Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter.”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: , BBC documentary (2009)
“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 (1944–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The first effect of modernism was to make high culture difficult: to surround beauty with a wall of erudition.”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Without the background of a remembered faith modernism loses its conviction: it becomes routinised. For a long time now it has been assumed that there can be no authentic creation in the sphere of high art which is not is some way a 'challenge' to the ordinary public. Art must give offence, stepping out of the future fully armed against the bourgeois taste for kitsch and cliché. But the result of this is that offence becomes a cliché.”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1944–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1944–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this lies the secret of its success.”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1944–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The future of mankind, for the socialist, is simple: pull down the existing order and allow the future to emerge.”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Democracies owe their existence to national loyalties — the loyalties that are supposedly shared by government and opposition, by all political parties, and by the electorate as a whole. Wherever the experience of nationality is weak or non-existent, democracy has failed to take root. For without national loyalty, opposition is a threat to government, and political disagreements create no common ground.”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“National loyalty is founded in the love of place, of the customs and traditions that have been inscribed in the landscape and of the desire to protect these good things through a common law and a common loyalty.”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“National loyalty involves a love of home and a preparedness to defend it; nationalism is a belligerent ideology, which uses national symbols in order to conscript the people to war.”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nationality is not the only kind of social membership, nor is it an exclusive tie. However, it is the only form of membership that has so far shown itself able to sustain a democratic process and a liberal rule of law.”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The idea that the citizen owes loyalty to a country, a territory, a jurisdiction and all those who reside within it — the root assumption of democratic politics, and one that depends upon the nation as its moral foundation - that idea has no place in the minds and hearts of many who now call themselves citizens of European states.”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1944–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1944–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1944–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[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 (1944–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1944–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Conservatism is a philosophy of inheritance and stewardship; it does not squander resources but strives to enhance them and pass them on.”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Stand up for the real meaning of freedom", The Spectator (January 2014)
“The real reason people are conservatives is that they are attached to the things that they love, and want to preserve them from abuse and decay. They are attached to their family, their friends, their religion, and their immediate environment. They have made a lifelong distinction between the things that nourish and the things that threaten their security and peace of mind.”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Conservatism and the Conservatory", National Review (December 2015)
“We are not born free, nor do we come into this world with a self-identity and autonomy of our own. We achieve those things, through the conflict and cooperation that weave us into the social fabric.”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Where We Are: The State of Britain Now (2017)
“If there is a single most deplorable intellectual failing on the conservative side, it lies in reducing every question of law, constitution, culture and society to a question of economics — the fundamental error of the Marxists, which nobody on the left would now dream of committing.”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 'The Tories will stay lost until they relearn how to be conservative', The Sunday Times (13 August 2017)
“I've never been an optimist but that's fine because pessimists have the possibility of being agreeably surprised, and that's a reason for being pessimistic, but I've always defended a certain kind of pessimism because what is known as optimism is really a collection of illusions and I think 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 can alone surmount the problems which they themselves create.”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From an interview with George Eaton "The Roger Scruton interview: the full transcript", New Statesman (26 April 2019, updated 7 June 2021)
“[T]he conservative cause has been polluted by the ideology of big business, by the global ambitions of the multinational companies, and by the ascendancy of economics in the thinking of modern politicians.”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In discussing tradition, we are not discussing arbitrary rules and conventions. We are discussing answers that have been discovered to enduring questions.”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Take any aspect of the Western inheritance of which our ancestors were proud, and you will find university courses devoted to deconstructing it. Take any positive feature of our political and cultural inheritance, and you will find concerted efforts in both the media and the academy to place it in quotation marks, and make it look like an imposture or a deceit.”
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source