Top 180 Roger Scruton Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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.”

— Roger Scruton

Featured in: Beauty Quotes

2. “A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.”

— Roger Scruton

3. “Art and music shine a light of meaning on ordinary life, and through them we are able to confront the things that trouble us and to find consolation and peace in their presence.”

— Roger Scruton

4. “Through the pursuit of beauty we shape the world as a home, and in doing so we both amplify our joys and find consolation for our sorrows.”

— Roger Scruton

5. “Nothing is more useful than the useless.”

— Roger Scruton

6. “The culture of a civilization is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.”

— Roger Scruton

7. “Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.”

— Roger Scruton

8. “The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation.”

— Roger Scruton

9. “Beauty is assailed from two directions – by the cult of ugliness in the arts, and by the cult of utility in everyday life.”

— Roger Scruton

10. “Being unpopular is never easy; but being unpopular in a good cause is a shield against despair.”

— Roger Scruton

11. “Art once made a cult of beauty. Now we have a cult of ugliness instead. This has made art into an elaborate joke, one which by now has ceased to be funny.”

— Roger Scruton

12. “In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.”

— Roger Scruton

13. “Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it does not matter.”

— Roger Scruton

14. “In our democratic culture people often think it is threatening to judge another person’s taste. Some are even offended by the suggestion that there is a difference between good and bad taste, or that it matters what you look at or read or listen to.”

— Roger Scruton

15. “There is a deep human need for beauty and if you ignore that need in architecture your buildings will not last.”

— Roger Scruton

16. “Wine is not just an object of pleasure, but an object of knowledge; and the pleasure depends on the knowledge.”

— Roger Scruton

17. “I believed that ‘freedom’ is not a clear or sufficient answer to the question of what conservatives believe in. Like Matthew Arnold, I held that ‘freedom is a very good horse to ride, but to ride somewhere’.”

— Roger Scruton

18. “Styles may change, details may come and go, but the broad demands of aesthetic judgement are permanent.”

— Roger Scruton

19. “Architecture, like dress, is an exercise in good manners, and good manners involve the habit of skillful insincerity – the habit of saying “good morning” to those whose mornings you would rather blight, and of passing the butter to those you would rather starve.”

— Roger Scruton

20. “The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy.”

— Roger Scruton

21. “The best evidence of a mind is when you change it.”

— Roger Scruton

22. “The music takes over the words and makes them speak to me in another language.”

— Roger Scruton

23. “There are no chords in modernist architecture, only lines – lines that may come to an end, but that achieve no closure.”

— Roger Scruton

24. “A philosopher who says, ‘There are no truths, only interpretations,’ risks the retort: ‘Is that true, or only an interpretation?’”

— Roger Scruton

25. “Like adverts, today’s works of art aim to create a brand, even if they have no product to sell except themselves.”

— Roger Scruton

26. “The important person in a free economy is not the manager but the entrepreneur – the one who takes risks and meets the cost of them.”

— Roger Scruton

27. “The art establishment has turned away from the old curriculum which puts beauty and craft at the top of the agenda.”

— Roger Scruton

28. “Private property is one of the best institutions which has ever evolved, to protect us from the bullying of others.”

— Roger Scruton

Featured in: Bullying Quotes

29. “Modernism in architecture went hand in hand with socialist and fascist projects to rid old Europe of its hierarchical past.”

— Roger Scruton

30. “When, in the works of Lacan, Deleuze and Althusser, the nonsense machine began to crank out its impenetrable sentences, of which nothing could be understood except that they all had “capitalism” as their target, it looked as though Nothing had at last found its voice.”

— Roger Scruton

31. “Art has the ability to redeem life by finding beauty even in the worst aspect of things.”

— Roger Scruton

32. “Marriage does not exist for the benefit of the present generation but for the benefit of the next.”

— Roger Scruton

33. “When gifts are replaced by rights, so is gratitude replaced by claims. And claims breed resentment.”

— Roger Scruton

34. “When art becomes merely shock value, our sense of humanity is slowly degraded.”

— Roger Scruton

35. “Classical buildings endure because they are loved, admired and accepted, and enjoy an innate adaption to human needs and purposes.”

— Roger Scruton

36. “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.”

— Roger Scruton

37. “Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch.”

— Roger Scruton

38. “When truth cannot make itself known in words, it will make itself known in deeds.”

— Roger Scruton

39. “Conservatives resonate to Burke’s view of society, as a partnership between the living, the unborn and the dead.”

— Roger Scruton

40. “The future of mankind, for the socialist, is simple: pull down the existing order and allow the future to emerge.”

— Roger Scruton

41. “A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t. Deconstruction deconstructs itself, and disappears up its own behind, leaving only a disembodied smile and a faint smell of sulphur.”

— Roger Scruton

42. “The core of common culture is religion. Tribes survive and flourish because they have gods, who fuse many wills into a single will, and demand and reward the sacrifices on which social life depends.”

— Roger Scruton

43. “Social traditions exist because they enable a society to reproduce itself. Destroy them heedlessly and you remove the guarantee offered by one generation to the next.”

— Roger Scruton

44. “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.”

— Roger Scruton

45. “Music addresses us from beyond the borders of the natural world.”

— Roger Scruton

46. “It is an ancient view that truth, goodness, and beauty cannot, in the end, conflict. Maybe the degeneration of beauty into kitsch comes precisely from the postmodern loss of truthfulness, and with it the loss of moral direction.”

— Roger Scruton

47. “Corbyn was not elected by the parliamentary party but by people who have the luxury of sounding off without the responsibility of answering for it. Corbyn represents the idiocy of direct democracy, and the culture of resentment that takes advantage of it.”

— Roger Scruton

48. “It is not enough to be nice; you have to be good. We are attracted by nice people; but only on the assumption that their niceness is a sign of goodness.”

— Roger Scruton

49. “Conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this lies the secret of its success.”

— Roger Scruton

50. “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.”

— Roger Scruton