Quotes from Roger Scruton

Top-down solutions have a tendency to confiscate problems from those whose problems they are.

The slaves had been liberated, and turned into morons.

Classical liberalism tells of the growth of individual liberty against the power of the sovereign. Socialism tells of the steadily increasing equality brought about by the state at the expense of the entrenched hierarchies of social power.

What makes a political order legitimate, in the conservative view, is not the free choices that create it, but the free choices that it creates.

And in answering that question he saw the inside of that bleak Viking world, the reality of love and compassion that all these hammer-throwing and skull-smashing gods concealed. That

For Medieval craftsmen, work was an act of piety and was sanctified in their own eyes as in the eyes of their God. For such labourers, end and means are one and he spiritual wholeness of faith is translated into the visual wholeness and purify of their craft. hence their craft was also art, a permanent testimony to the reality on earth of humanity's spiritual redemption.

Every form of social and political belief that lies before us today is related to the Romantic movement, for that is the archetype of our ongoing attempt to live by our own devices. This is more true of socialism than of conservatism, in fact – socialism being a kind of diseased nostalgia for the future, which is yet more damaging than nostalgia for the past.

Nonsemes and mathemes stand next to each other in detached and mutually irrelevant jumbles. They lack the crucial valency that ties sentence to sentence in a truth-directed argument or formula to formula in a valid proof, and they can accumulate forever without getting to the point of saying or revealing what they mean.

Kitsch is fake art, expressing fake emotions, whose purpose is to deceive the consumer into thinking he feels something deep and serious, when in fact he feels nothing at all.

The personal eludes biology in just the way that the face in the picture eludes the theory of pigments. The personal is not an addition to the biological: it emerges from it, in something like the way the face emerges from the colored patches on a canvas.

Accountability in public office is but one manifestation of this cultural inheritance, and we should not be surprised that it is the first thing to disappear when the utopians and the planners take over.

Strident minorities, acting on the growing disposition to censor their opponents, ensure that the deeper the question, the more likely it is to be settled by shallow arguments.

Lo que resulta inaceptable en la filosofía política que hoy se oferta es su incapacidad por reconocer que la mayor parte de lo que somos y debemos nos ha sido dado sin nuestro consentimiento

Opportunities are enhanced not by closing things down, but by opening things up. It is by allowing autonomous institutions to grow, by protecting the space in which they flourish, and

Free speech is a sign of a strong first-person plural, which enables people who disagree over fundamental things to live together in a condition of mutual toleration.

At the very moment when universities are advocating diversity as a fundamental academic value, the true diversity for which a university should make a stand, namely diversity of opinion, has been steadily eroded and in many places destroyed entirely.

The God of the philosophers disappeared behind the world, because he was described in the third person, and not addressed in the second.

Whose freedom, how exercised, how circumscribed and how defined?

Kant enjoyed the company of women (provided that they did not pretend to understand the Critique of Pure Reason) and

The greatest task on the right, therefore, is to rescue the language of politics: to put within our grasp what has been forcibly removed from it by jargon.

Smith emphasized that trust, responsibility and accountability exist only in a society that respects them, and only where the spontaneous fruit of human sympathy is allowed to ripen. It is where sympathy, duty and virtue achieve their proper place that self-interest leads, by an invisible hand, to a result that benefits everyone.

Conservatism is not a matter of defending global capitalism at all costs, or securing the privileges of the few against the many. It is a matter of defending civil society, maintaining autonomous institutions, and defending the citizen against the abuse of power

One thing is immediately apparent, and this is that many statements made in the first-person case are epistemologically privileged.

Maybe a knowledge of literature and history was of no immediate benefit to a soldier in the ranks during the second world war; without it, however, it would have been impossible for Churchill to exert the kind of leadership that distinguished him, and which aroused even in the most uneducated the sense that far more was at stake than he could easily define.