Quotes from Roger Scruton

A change of taste is not a 'change of mind', in the way that a change of belief or even of moral posture is a change of mind.

While he joined eagerly in the contemporary intellectual battles, philosophy was, for Spinoza, not a weapon but a way of life, a sacred order whose servants were transported to a supreme and certain blessedness.

Symbols of national loyalty are neither militant nor ideological, but consist in peaceful images of the homeland, of the place where we belong. National loyalties, therefore, aid reconciliation between classes, interests, and faiths

Kant wishes to draw the limits of the understanding. If there are things that cannot be grasped by the understanding, then all assertions about them are meaningless.

Ideological opinion is not merely distinct from knowledge but the enemy of knowledge.

The question we now have to consider, is whether this state of mind has any rational ground, whether it tells us anything about the world in which we live, and whether its exercise is a part of human fulfilment. Such, at any rate, would be the philosophical approach to our topic.

There are so many plans, and so many schemes, and so many reasons why there should be neither plans nor schemes.

Unless and until people identify themselves with the country, its territory and its cultural inheritance – in something like the way people identify themselves with a family – the politics of compromise will not emerge. We

In the German city-states there emerged thereafter a high culture, in which literature, philosophy, music, art and architecture were all spurred on by the rivalry of local sovereigns and the spread of Enlightenment ideas.

We have to take our neighbours seriously, as people with an equal claim to protection, for whom we might be required, in moments of crisis, to face mortal danger. We do this because we believe ourselves to belong together in a shared home. The

But that is not the approach of the evolutionary psychologists, who argue that we can best understand our states of mind if we identify their evolutionary origins, and the contribution that they (or some earlier version of them) might have made to the reproductive strategies of our genes.

When the Communist Party took over Eastern Europe, its first work was to destroy the civil associations that it did not control.

The Abbé Sieyès, in his inflammatory pamphlet, What is the Third Estate? of 1789, expressed the point succinctly. 'The nation is prior to everything. It is the source of everything. Its will is always legal … The manner in which a nation exercises its will does not matter; the point is that it does exercise it; any procedure is adequate, and its will is always the supreme law.' Twenty

You can endure insults and abuse when you know them to be false. But if the remarks that offend you are true, their truth becomes a dagger in the soul - you cry lies! at the top of your voice, and know that you must silence the one who utters them.

There is, in the circumstances of modern life, only one solution to the problem of resentment, and that is social mobility. The worst thing that the state can do is to create those traps – the poverty trap, the welfare trap, the education trap – which deprive people of the motives and the skills to improve their lot, and retain them in a state of permanent discontented dependence on a world that they cannot fully enter. In

Conservatives resonate to Burke's view of society, as a partnership between the living, the unborn and the dead.

Beauty matters. It is not just a subjective thing but a universal need of human beings. If we ignore this need we find ourselves in a spiritual desert.

Beauty is assailed from two directions - by the cult of ugliness in the arts, and by the cult of utility in everyday life.

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.

The real cure to immigration, obviously, is to make sure that there is prosperity around the world so that people don't have the motive. Not just prosperity, but freedom.

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.

Fashion makes me laugh.

To live with someone who likes you, and whose judgement you respect, because you love them, does make quite a difference, I find.

For two centuries the English countryside has been an icon of national identity and the loved reminder of our island home. Yet the government is bent on littering the hills with wind turbines and the valleys with high speed railways.