Quotes from Roger Scruton

When a woman cries date rape what she means is the whole thing went too quickly.

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

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.

Lives are destroyed by many things. They are destroyed by anti-racism too, as Ray Honeyford's was.

Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude.

Whether it is a garden gnome, the sound of Bing Crosby launching into 'White Christmas', the blinking innocent eyes of Bambi or the words of Patience Strong, the kitsch phenomenon is there as strong and recognisable as your mother's face. You seldom if ever have the question, whether this is kitsch or not. If you think it might be, then it is.

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.

The Marxist theory of ideology is extremely contentious, not least because it is tied to socio-economic hypotheses that are no longer believable.

A high culture is the self-consciousness of a society. It contains the works of art, literature, scholarship and philosophy that establish a shared frame of reference among educated people.

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

All political order presupposes a pre-political order, a sense that people belong together. And then, of course, they might seek a contract that embodies their togetherness. But the togetherness has to be there.

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?

One must recognise what all religious people know, which is that human beings are imperfect and fallen and there's no way in which they alone can surmount the problems which they create.

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

My life divides into three parts. In the first I was wretched; in the second ill at ease; in the third hunting.

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is 'merely relative,' is asking you not to believe him. So don't.

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.

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.

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.

When I say there is no such crime as date rape I am saying what is true. There isn't a specific legal category of date rape and I wanted to make that point in order to ensure that people don't use this to obscure the difference between real sexual violence and, you know, things that have gone wrong.

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.

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.

Delia Smith is, actually, my bete noire. I consider her a most pernicious influence.

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.