Quotes from 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.

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

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.

In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.

The culture of a civilization is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.

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?

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.

A lot of the Qur'an is, frankly, cantankerous, vitriolic, man-hating stuff.

The Scottish desire for independence is, to some extent, a fabrication. They want to identify themselves as Scots but still to be part of a, to enjoy the subsidy they get from being part of the kingdom.

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.

There is a deep human need for beauty and if you ignore that need in architecture your buildings will not last

Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it does not matter.

The art establishment has turned away from the old curriculum which puts beauty and craft at the top of the agenda.

The first effect of modernism was to make high culture difficult: to surround beauty with a wall of erudition.

Affect not to despise beauty: no one is freed from its dominion; But regard it not a pearl of price--it is fleeting as the bow in the clouds.

Like every other viable environmental policy, the search for clean energy begins at home.

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.

My own view is that left-wing positions largely come about from resentment - I agree with Nietzsche about this - a resentment about the surrounding social order. They have privileges, I don't. Or, I have them and I can't live up to them.

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.

The robust English view used to be that the correct response to offensive words is to ignore them, or to answer them with a rebuke. If you invoke the law at all, it should be to protect the one who gives the offence, and not the one who takes it. Now, it seems, it is all the other way round.

No, I don't think I've ever really favoured English independence. My view is that if the Scots want to be independent then we should aim for the same thing.

The true face of religion belongs to the re-enchantment of our injured civilization; faith is a way of filling all the spiritual spaces in our damaged world with the vision of a loving God, the God described in the Qur'an as al-Rahman al-Rahim.

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

The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy.