Quotes About Roger Scruton

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

Beauty is not the source of disinterested pleasure, but simply the object of a universal interest: the interest that we have in beauty, and in the pleasure that beauty brings.

England for him was no longer a real place, but a consecrated isle in the lake of forgetting, where the God of the English still strode through an imaginary Eden, admiring His works.

If he had stayed in Slovenia, and Slovenia had stayed Communist, Žižek would not have been the nuisance he has since become. Indeed, if there were no greater reason to regret the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, the release of Žižek on to the world of Western scholarship would perhaps already be a sufficient one.

I say it was immediately apparent, but it was not apparent to the intellectual class, which has remained largely wedded to the post-war consensus to this day. 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.

It is only when people have rights of property, and can freely exchange what they own for what they need, that a society of strangers can achieve economic coordination. Socialists

In Die Welt von Gestern, Stefan Zweig attributed the decline of civil order in Europe to the myth of progress.7 In all the ideologies of his day – communism, socialism, Nazism, fascism – Zweig saw the same pernicious attempt to rewrite the principles of social order in terms of a linear progression from past to future. The

The root cause of our musical crisis is the same as the root cause of so many other crises during our century: namely, the rise of the intelligentsia as a priesthood of unbelievers.

Jean-Pierre Marquis, From a Geometrical Point of View: A Study of the History and Philosophy of Category Theory, Springer Science & Business Media, 2008.

Through the pursuit of beauty we shape the world as a home and come to understand our own nature as spiritual beings.

Oscar Wilde defined the cynic as the one who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

The search for a policy to overcome original sin is not a coherent political project.

Beauty matters. It is not just a subjective thing but a universal need of human beings. If we ignore this need we find ourselves in a spiritual desert.

To people like me, educated in post-war Britain, free speech has been a firm premise of the British way of life.

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.