Top 66 Roger Scruton Quotes

For two centuries the English countryside has been an icon of national identity and the loved reminder of our island home. Yet the government is bent on littering the hills with wind turbines and the valleys with high speed railways.

I’ve never been an optimist, but that’s fine because pessimists have the possibility of being agreeably surprised.

I’ve spent my life arguing for greater respect between men and women and anyone who takes the time to read my books or listen to my lectures will realise this.

When I say there is no such crime as date rape I am saying what is true. There isn’t a specific legal category of date rape and I wanted to make that point in order to ensure that people don’t use this to obscure the difference between real sexual violence and, you know, things that have gone wrong.

Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.

Ultimately, political order does not generate itself.

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

What makes us human is that we ask questions. All the animals have interests, instincts and conceptions. All the animals frame for themselves an idea of the world in which they live. But we alone question our surroundings.

One of the questions that has most bothered me in my reflections on culture is the question of kitsch. Just what is it? When did it begin? And why?

A lot of the Qur’an is, frankly, cantankerous, vitriolic, man-hating stuff.

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.

One must recognise what all religious people know, which is that human beings are imperfect and fallen and there’s no way in which they alone can surmount the problems which they create.

Like every other viable environmental policy, the search for clean energy begins at home.

I’m a hate figure for a certain kind of half-educated politically correct person.

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.

I am hostile to the idea that collective solutions have to be made by committees and then imposed top-down. I very much prefer bottom-up solutions.

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.

The conservative is the one who understands his own society from within and loves and defends it.

A high culture is the self-consciousness of a society. It contains the works of art, literature, scholarship and philosophy that establish a shared frame of reference among educated people.

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

America has this wonderful ability to recover from its own mistakes, which is why it’s so hugely superior to China.

If you’re going to have a free economy, one in which the ordinary citizen can dispose of his own income, you’re going to have people who dispose of it in an anti-social way.

To live with someone who likes you, and whose judgement you respect, because you love them, does make quite a difference, I find.

For many artists and critics, beauty is a discredited idea. It denotes the saccharine sylvan scenes and cheesy melodies that appealed to Granny.

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

The world of art, I have suggested, is full of fakes. Fake originality, fake emotion and the fake expertise of the critics – these are all around us and in such abundance that we hardly know where to look for the real thing. Or perhaps there is no real thing?

Given the right to – given the opportunity to vote, I voted for Brexit because I’ve never approved really of the European Union, I never approved of it because of its attempts to confiscate national sovereignty in all the issues that matter.

The Marxist theory of ideology is extremely contentious, not least because it is tied to socio-economic hypotheses that are no longer believable.

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.

Buildings like Penn Station attract our protective instincts not only because of their beauty but because we fear what will come to replace them.

All political order presupposes a pre-political order, a sense that people belong together. And then, of course, they might seek a contract that embodies their togetherness. But the togetherness has to be there.

In mathematics and science we solve our problems as well as create them. But in art and philosophy things are not so simple.

The rude, raw, ‘let it all hang out’ freedom of the Californian hippies was in fact the most censorious and oppressive of societies that I have encountered.

I do ask myself why I make people so enraged, because I only ever say what I think. And while I know it might not be everyone’s point of view, that doesn’t seem particularly intolerable to me.

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.

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.

The true face of religion belongs to the re-enchantment of our injured civilization; faith is a way of filling all the spiritual spaces in our damaged world with the vision of a loving God, the God described in the Qur’an as al-Rahman al-Rahim.

My 2018 ended with a hate storm, in response to my appointment as chair of the government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission.

The sanctity of private property is so fundamental a part of the American settlement that the country’s conservatives look with suspicion on any policy that seems to prevent people from doing what they will with what is theirs.

I know ideals aren’t realities, but they do influence reality – social, legal, political, cultural.

Faking is a social activity in which people act together to draw a veil over unwanted realities and encourage each other in the exercise of their illusory powers.

Conservatives hold on to things not only because they are attached to them, but also because they do not see the sense in radical change, until someone has told them what it will lead to.

What the word conservative means is not putting things back but conserving them. There are things that are threatened and you love them, so you want to keep them.

Each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one and that is a very frightening thing.

Although homosexuality has been normalised, it is not normal.

Under the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006, it is an offence to stir up hatred towards religious and racial groups. ‘Stirring up hatred’ is an expression both loaded and undefined. Do I stir up hatred towards a religious group by criticising its beliefs in outspoken terms?

The traditional family has an intrinsic as well as an instrumental value, and that is the real reason so many conservatives defend it.

Cameron’s resignation really was the death knell of the Conservative Party as we knew it because that’s something a proper Conservative politician cannot do: renounce leadership at the moment when it’s needed.

If you say something in advance – if you describe a problem as it arises, people always turn on you because they don’t want to hear about it. But when it’s too late to do anything, they will then turn around and say that you were right. That’s human nature.

Conservatives reveal themselves through their care for ordinary human things, and their recognition of the fragility of decency and the need to protect it.

The real cure to immigration, obviously, is to make sure that there is prosperity around the world so that people don’t have the motive. Not just prosperity, but freedom.

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

Perhaps the world of art is just one vast pretence, in which we all take part since, after all, there is no real cost to it, except to those like Charles Saatchi, rich enough to splash out on junk?

Conservatism, for me, is the philosophy and the politics of attachment.

Abstract ideas like equality and liberty have a spurious transparency, and can be used to derive pleasing theorems in the manner of Jean-Jacques Rousseau or John Rawls.

In the traditional dances, physical contact was permitted in a way that it wasn’t in everyday life. The electricity of physical contact has gone therefore from young people’s lives.

I’ve always loved horses.