Quotes from Roger Scruton

Kant's position is extremely subtle – so subtle, indeed, that no commentator seems to agree with any other as to what it is.

Verificationism arose in Vienna between the wars, as part of the 'culture of repudiation' whereby central Europe threw away its inheritance and committed moral suicide.

he divides metaphysics into three parts – rational psychology, concerning the nature of the soul; cosmology, concerning the nature of the universe and our status within it; and theology, concerning the existence of God.

el comunismo que preconizaba Marx entraña una contradicción: es una situación en la que se disfruta de todas las ventajas que tiene el orden legal, pero no existe la ley; en la que se logran todos los beneficios de la cooperación social, a pesar de que nadie goza de esos derechos de propiedad que, hasta la fecha, han sido los que han hecho posible precisamente la cooperación.

The bitter thought against which Don Juan hopelessly rebels is the same thought that contains the promise of Tristan's consolation: the thought of death. Don Juanism and Tristanism are extreme responses to a perception that lies at the root of human attraction and human love: the thought of our common mortality.

Conservatives believe in unchosen obligations (pieties), whereas classical liberals think that the only source of obligation is choice.

Durkheim pointed out that you don't merely believe a religion but (more importantly) you belong to it, and that disputes over religious doctrine are, as a rule, not simply arguments about abstruse questions of metaphysics but attempts to give a viable test of membership, and hence a way of identifying and excluding the heretics who threaten the community from within. Religion

The effect of pornographic fantasy is to 'commodify' the object of desire, and to replace love and its vestigial sacraments with the law of the market. This is the final disenchantment of the human world. When sex becomes a commodity, the most important sanctuary of human ideals becomes a market, and value is reduced to price.

The pursuit of absolute or ideal beauty may distract us from the more urgent business of getting things right. It is well and good for philosophers, poets and theologians to point towards beauty in its highest form. But for most of us it is far more important to achieve order in the things surrounding us, and to ensure that the eyes, the ears and the sense of fittingness are not repeatedly offended.

Smith did not regard economic freedom as the sum of politics, nor did he believe that self-interest is the only, or even the most important, motive governing our economic behaviour. A market can deliver a rational allocation of goods and services only where there is trust between its participants, and trust exists only where people take responsibility for their actions and make themselves accountable to those with whom they deal. In other words, economic order depends on moral order.

Oscar Wilde defined the cynic as the one who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

Government is not what so many conservatives believe it to be, and what people on the left always believe it to be when it is in other hands than their own – namely a system of power and domination.

realities instead.

One of the great gifts of the Enlightenment is that we can form communities without necessaily agreeing on ultimate metaphysical grounds. We know that to a great extent that the principles of social coordination are manmade, we recognise the right of the other to exist. This is something that distinguishes our part of the world from the middle East.

The philosopher and the scientist emphasize different features of the world, follow different interests and inspire different passions in the soul. But the aim of their study is in each case the same: the supreme good which consists in the adequate knowledge of God

In short, freedom belongs to individuals only by virtue of their membership in the 'we'.

It is one mark of rational beings that they do not live only - or even at all - in the present. They have the freedom to despise the world that surrounds them and to live in another way.

I was a lonely adolescent, in a lonely country, where the rules were made for the sake of people who did not pay the cost of them. Our daylight world was one of slogans in which no one believed, of vague prohibitions and joyless celebrations of our benign enslavement. It was a world without friendship, in which every gathering was an object of suspicion, and in which people spoke in whispers for fear that even the most innocent remark could accuse the speaker of a crime.

The search for a policy to overcome original sin is not a coherent political project.

Art, as we have known it, stands on the threshold of the transcendental. It points beyond this world of accidental and disconnected things to another realm, in which human life is endowed with an emotional logic that makes suffering noble and love worthwhile. Nobody who is alert to beauty, therefore, is without the concept of redemption—of a final transcendence of mortal disorder into a 'kingdom of ends'. (p. 156)

People become free individuals by learning to take responsibility for their actions. And they do this through relating to others, subject to subject. The free individuals to whom the Founders appealed were free only because they had grown through the bonds of society, to the point of taking full responsibility for their actions and granting to each other the rights and privileges that established a kind of moral equality between them.

It should not be thought that the cost of a system which makes an idol of ignorance and a prophet of the crowd is small.

Whatever we think about the revolutions, the original slogan of the French Revolution – liberté, égalité, fraternité – was just a slogan, and nobody troubled to ask themselves whether liberté and égalité were compatible in practice. Really the subsequent history has been an illustration of that conflict between them.

accountable government does not come through elections. It comes through respect for law, through public spirit and through a culture of confession. To