Quotes from Roger Scruton

The picture of a universe of infinitely many wholly unrelated substances is at least as hard to understand as the monism of Spinoza, and far less easy to reconcile with appearances.

In its 'totalising' vision the left fails to distinguish civil society from the state, and fails to understand that the ends of life arise from our free associations and not from the coercive discipline of an egalitarian elite.

Music, Schopenhauer wrote, is not unconscious arithmetic, as Leibniz had claimed, but unconscious philosophy, since in music the inner essence of the world, which is will, is made directly present to the mind.

accountable government does not come through elections. It comes through respect for law, through public spirit and through a culture of confession. To think that there is a merely accidental connection between those virtues and our Judaeo-Christian heritage is to live in cloud cuckoo land. It is to overlook the culture that has focused, down the centuries, on the business of repentance.

The most important input into conservative thinking is the desire to sustain the networks of familiarity and trust on which a community depends for its longevity. Conservatism is what its name says it is: the attempt to conserve the community that we have

A reactionary is fixed on the past and wanting to return to it; a conservative wishes to adapt what is best in the past to the changing circumstances of the present.

To the mass of mankind, therefore, the philosopher may appear as a spiritual saboteur, a subverter of things lawfully established, and an apologist for the devil. So Spinoza appeared to his contemporaries, and for many years after his death he was regarded as the greatest heretic of the 17th century.

Civilization is always threatened from below, by patterns of belief and emotion that may once have been useful to our ancestors, but that are useful no longer.

Gradually this truth is beginning to dawn on the political class, so that even socialists have come to accept that the poor are not helped by taking revenge against the rich, but by opening the doors to social advancement. Since

This law is implanted in us by reason, and God himself obeys it. If human beings do not obey the natural law it is because reason does not entirely govern their behavior. The purpose of a legal is to provide an effective substitute for reason in the motives of unreasonable men. He added, however, that rights are nothing without the power which would enforce them, and therefore that power, not right, is the basic fact of politics." -Spinoza

Hence we inevitably see ourselves from outside, as others see us, and seek for their approval and sympathy, which is the greatest of social goods.

The important thing, Father Pavel had said, is not our belief, but His grace. We refuse His gifts out of meanness, for we fear the cost of them. And yes, the cost is everything.

When I put my trust in a critic, this is tantamount to saying that I defer to his judgement, even when I have made no judgement of my own. But my own judgement waits upon experience. It is only when I have heard the piece in question, in the moment of appreciation, that my borrowed opinion can actually become a judgement of mine.

all the respects that I have so far mentioned, conversation fits the bill of a free association which is subservient to no purpose but itself, and which is destroyed by the bossiness and urgencies of the planner, the utopian and the rationalist. On the other hand, conversations have to be among few participants if they are to dispense with some kind of central discipline or with accepted procedures and conventions. As

Drudgery means doing an ungrateful task for an ungrateful person – and anyone employed at the bottom of the labour market knows what that means. The

law of nature that our scientific thinking tends toward the truth, our morality toward the good, and maybe (though he doesn't go this far) our tastes toward the beautiful.

We must not think of this merely as a theological or metaphysical question. For

El vino no es sólo un objeto de placer, sino un objeto de conocimiento, y el placer depende del conocimiento

If we cannot justify the very concept of the aesthetic, except as ideology, then aesthetic judgement is without philosophical foundation. An 'ideology' is adopted for its social or political utility, rather than its truth. And

Este imposibil s? aperi conving?tor cultura înalt? în faÅ£a unei persoane total lipsite de cultur?.

When the chips are down, Orwell argued, our workers do not defend their class but their country, and they associate their country with a gentle way of life in which unusual and eccentric habits – such as not killing one another – are accepted as the way things are. In these respects, Orwell also thought, the leftist intellectuals will always misunderstand the workers, who want nothing to do with a self-vaunting disloyalty that only intellectuals can afford.

Indeed, the first thing you might learn, in considering jokes, is that Marcel Duchamp's urinal was one—quite a good one the first time around, corny by mid-twentieth century, and downright stupid today.

No market economy can function properly without the support of legal and moral sanctions, designed to hold individual agents to their bargains, and to return the cost of misbehaviour to the one who causes it. But

the mind, to borrow Hume's metaphor, 'spreads itself upon objects'.