Roger Scruton Quotes

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Roger Scruton

Profession : Philosopher

Birth : February 27, 1944

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.

Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton

One of the questions that has most bothered me in my reflections on culture is the question of kitsch. Just what is it? When did it begin? And why?

Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton

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

Roger Scruton

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?

Roger Scruton

You cannot own a symphony or a novel in the way you can own a Damien Hirst. As a result there are far fewer fake symphonies or fake novels than there are fake works of visual art.

Roger Scruton

The great benefit of philosophy, which is also its great weakness, is that all its steps are taken in the spirit of doubt.

Roger Scruton

We live in an extremely anxious age in which the core of our beliefs has been undermined to a great extent by scientific thinking.

Roger Scruton

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

Roger Scruton

There are big questions science doesn't answer, such as why is there something rather than nothing? There can't be a scientific answer to that because it's the answer that precedes science.

Roger Scruton

To people like me, educated in post-war Britain, free speech has been a firm premise of the British way of life.

Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton

If, as many people believe, there is a God, and that God made us in his own image, then of course we are distinct from nature, just as He is.

Roger Scruton

Morality is like a field of flowers beneath which the corpses are piled in a thousand layers. It is an evolved mechanism whereby the human organism proceeds through life sustained on every side by bonds of mutual interest.

Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton

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

Roger Scruton