Quotes from Roger Scruton

For Conservatives, all disputes over law, liberty and justice are addressed to a historic and existing community. The root of politics, they believe, is attachment - the motive in human beings that binds them to the place, the customs, the history and the people who are theirs.

America is the one place where you can talk of 'this nation' and everyone knows exactly what you think. People put a flag on their porch, and they do have a desire to localize everything and celebrate things locally.

The core of common culture is religion. Tribes survive and flourish because they have gods, who fuse many wills into a single will, and demand and reward the sacrifices on which social life depends.

Wine is not just an object of pleasure, but an object of knowledge; and the pleasure depends on the knowledge.

To teach virtue we must educate the emotions, and this means learning "what to feel" in the various circumstances that prompt them.

I am a conservative thinker, well known as such, outspoken as such but reasonable in my view.

On the whole, I rather disapprove of cookbooks, except for the literary ones, like Elizabeth David's.

Science proposes something and then does everything it can to disprove it. Religion is not like that. It proposes something and does everything it can to keep it from being disproved.

Art has the ability to redeem life by finding beauty even in the worst aspect of things.

Leftwing people find it very hard to get on with rightwing people, because they believe that they are evil. Whereas I have no problem getting on with leftwing people, because I simply believe that they are mistaken.

It's right to flog a dead horse sometimes, when the previous flogging has not annihilated it.

My father was a man of principle who found his principles confirmed in the unremitting failure which they brought on him.

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.

Nonsense has taken up residence in the heart of public debate and also in the academy. This nonsense is part of the huge fund of unreason on which the plans and schemes of optimists draw for their vitality. Nonsense confiscates meaning. It thereby puts truth and falsehood, reason and unreason, light and darkness on an equal footing. It is a blow cast in defence of intellectual freedom, as the optimists construe it, namely the freedom to believe anything at all, provided you feel better for it.

Top-down government breeds irresponsible individuals, and the confiscation of civil society by the state leads to a widespread refusal among the citizens to act for themselves.

I am not an advocate of Enlightenment. On the contrary, I see it as a form of light pollution, which prevents us from seeing the stars.

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'. In an age of declining faith art bears enduring witness to the spiritual hunger and immortal longings of our species. Hence aesthetic education matters more today than at any previous period in history.

We are not born free, nor do we come into this world with a self-identity and autonomy of our own. We achieve those things, through the conflict and cooperation that weave us into the social fabric. We become freely choosing individuals only by acquiring obligations to parents, siblings, institutions and groups: obligations that we did not choose.

Pop pollution has an effect on musical appreciation comparable to pornography on sex. All that is beautiful, special and full of love is replaced by a grinding mechanism. Just as porn addicts lose the capacity for real sexual love, so do pop addicts lose the capacity for genuine musical experience.

Free speech is not the cause of the tensions that are growing around us, but the only possible solution to them.

The consolation of an imaginary thing is still a real consolation.

State solutions are imposed from above; they are often without corrective devices, and cannot easily be reversed on the proof of failure. Their inflexibility goes hand in hand with their planned and goal-directed nature, and when they fail the efforts of the state are directed not to changing them but to changing people's belief that they have failed.

Social traditions exist because they enable a society to reproduce itself. Destroy them heedlessly and you remove the guarantee offered by one generation to the next.

Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways.. Yet it is never viewed with indifference; beauty demands to be noticed; it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend. If there are people who are indifferent to beauty, then it is surely because they do not perceive