Quotes from Roger Scruton

it is not the taste considered in itself, that we hold to our lips, and you can no more understand the virtues of a wine through a blind tasting than you could understand the virtues of a woman through a blindfold kiss.

Contempt for the dead leads to the disenfranchisement of the unborn, and although that result is not perhaps inevitable, it has been repeated by all subsequent revolutions....Radical individualists enter the world without social capital of their own, and they consume all that they find.

The pursuit of abstract social justice goes hand in hand with the view that power struggles and relations of domination express the truth of our social condition, and that the consensual customs, inherited institutions and systems of law that have brought peace to real communities are merely the disguises worn by power. The goal is to seize that power, and to use it to liberate the oppressed, distributing all the assets of society according to the just requirements of the plan.

I saw that this desire to control society in the name of equality expresses exactly the contempt for human freedom that I encountered in Eastern Europe. There

Originality requires learning, hard work, the mastery of a medium and – most of all – the refined sensibility and openness to experience that have suffering and solitude as their normal cost.

People discovered, in their personal lives, that civil society is not goal-directed. It comes into being, in whatever circumstances, as an end in itself, a form of life that is appreciated for what it is, not for what it does.

At the same time, instead of limiting the power of the state, alleged human rights have begun to enhance that power, and to bring the state into all our disputes on the side of the favoured party. Rights

The freedom to entertain and express opinions, however offensive to others, has been regarded since Locke as the sine qua non of a free society. This

The assault on the human world in the name of science is more pseudo-science than science, and rejoices in its bald, unmoralised image of 'what we really are'. What we really are from the scientific point of view is precisely what we really aren't.

The most interesting aspect of this culture of repudiation has been the attack on the central place accorded to reason in human affairs by the writers, philosophers and political theorists of the Enlightenment. The old

Our human need for beauty is not simply a redundant addition to the list of human appetites. It is not something that we could lack and still be fulfilled as people. It is a need arising from our metaphysical condition as free individuals, seeking our place in an objective world.

I never swallowed in its entirety the free-market rhetoric of the Thatcherites. But I deeply sympathized with Thatcher's motives. She wanted the electorate to recognize that the individual's life is his own and the responsibility of living it cannot be borne by anyone else, still less by the state. She hoped to release the talent and enterprise that, notwithstanding decades of egalitarian claptrap, she believed yet to exist in British society. The

I have argued that the political process, as we in Western democracies have inherited it, depends upon citizenship, which in turn depends upon a viable first-person plural. And in the previous chapter I gave what to me are incontrovertible arguments for construing that first-person plural in national terms. No such first-person plural can emerge in a society divided against itself, in which local antagonisms and class war eclipse every understanding of a shared destiny.

Our word 'poetry' comes from Greek poi?sis, the skill of making things;

Religious quarrels,' he added, 'do not arise so much from ardent zeal for religion, as from men's various dispositions and love of contradiction, which causes them habitually to distort and condemn everything, however rightly it may have been said.

the good citizen is the one who knows when voting is the wrong way to decide a question, as well as when voting is the right way. For

The Anglo-American tradition of constitutional thinking should be understood in this way, as addressing the question of how to limit the power of government, without losing its benefits. That

And I saw that this desire to control society in the name of equality expresses exactly the contempt for human freedom that I encountered in Eastern Europe. There is indeed such a thing as society; but it is composed of individuals. And individuals must be free, which means being free from the insolent claims of those who wish to redesign them.

A society governed by consent does not necessarily issue from a social contract, whether actual or implied. It is a society in which dealings between citizens, and between citizens and those in authority, are consensual, in the manner of daily courtesies, games of football, theatrical events or family meals. As Adam Smith made clear, order may emerge from consensual dealings. But it emerges 'by an invisible hand', and not, as a rule, because someone has imposed it. In

In general we should be aware of, and protective towards, those precious legal instruments that we already possess, and which often depend on principles of equity and natural law and not on top-down legislation.

It is to overlook the culture that has focused, down the centuries, on the business of repentance.

Paul Benacerraf, 'What Numbers Could Not Be,' Philosophical Review (1965).

The very same 'mystery' that veils the human person from the neurophysiologist veils human history from the Marxian determinist and human morality from the sociobiologist.

Robert Conquest once announced three laws of politics, the first of which says that everyone is right-wing in the matters he knows about.