Roger Scruton Quotes

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Roger Scruton

Profession : Philosopher

Birth : February 27, 1944

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.

Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton

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

Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton

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

Roger Scruton

My little book of stories, 'Souls in the Twiligh,' may have to stand in for all the other things I have wanted to write in my retirement.

Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton

I love Viennese waltzes and polkas, and especially ceilidhs and old-fashioned formation dancing.

Roger Scruton

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

Roger Scruton

In the traditional dances, physical contact was permitted in a way that it wasn't in everyday life. The electricity of physical contact has gone therefore from young people's lives.

Roger Scruton

I am hostile to the idea that collective solutions have to be made by committees and then imposed top-down. I very much prefer bottom-up solutions.

Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton

My main argument is that environmental destruction comes when people externalise their costs and pass them on to future generations. That is obviously something that large enterprises do and they become large by doing it.

Roger Scruton

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

Roger Scruton

America is the one place where you can talk of 'this nation' and everyone knows exactly what you think. People put a flag on their porch, and they do have a desire to localize everything and celebrate things locally.

Roger Scruton

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

Roger Scruton

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

Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton