Roger Scruton Quotes

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Roger Scruton

Profession : Philosopher

Birth : February 27, 1944

I am a conservative thinker, well known as such, outspoken as such but reasonable in my view.

Roger Scruton

Cameron's resignation really was the death knell of the Conservative Party as we knew it because that's something a proper Conservative politician cannot do: renounce leadership at the moment when it's needed.

Roger Scruton

But the European Union does not have a concept of national identity. It was set up to abolish that idea, not to abolish German national identity because that was trying to save itself.

Roger Scruton

The main aim of conservative politicians is to get through to the next election without being noticed. Nothing is more embarrassing to them than a person who claims not only to share their beliefs but also to be inclined to put them into practice.

Roger Scruton

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

Roger Scruton

Ultimately, political order does not generate itself.

Roger Scruton

For many artists and critics, beauty is a discredited idea. It denotes the saccharine sylvan scenes and cheesy melodies that appealed to Granny.

Roger Scruton

What makes us human is that we ask questions. All the animals have interests, instincts and conceptions. All the animals frame for themselves an idea of the world in which they live. But we alone question our surroundings.

Roger Scruton

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

Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton

Each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one and that is a very frightening thing.

Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton

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?

Roger Scruton

I've always loved horses.

Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton

There has been throughout this country and throughout Europe really an attempt silence the conservative voice. We get identified, caricatured and then demonised and made to look as though we are some kind of sinister, fascist, racist kind of people.

Roger Scruton

The traditional family has an intrinsic as well as an instrumental value, and that is the real reason so many conservatives defend it.

Roger Scruton

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

Roger Scruton

What the word conservative means is not putting things back but conserving them. There are things that are threatened and you love them, so you want to keep them.

Roger Scruton