Top 180 Roger Scruton Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “In the absence of organized religion, the only vehicle for redemption is art – not just the fragmentary arts of painting or music or poetry, but the kind of art that creates a whole world in itself and in that world we see ourselves reflected and see our religious life perfected.”

— Roger Scruton

52. “The love of beauty is really a signal to free ourselves from that sensory attachment, and to begin the ascent of the soul towards the world of ideas, there to participate in the divine version of reproduction, which is the understanding and the passing on of eternal truths.”

— Roger Scruton

53. “Faith exalts the human heart, by removing it from the market-place, making it sacred and unexchangeable. Under the jurisdiction of religion our deeper feelings are sacralized, so as to become raw material for the ethical life: the life lived in judgement.”

— Roger Scruton

54. “The first effect of modernism was to make high culture difficult: to surround beauty with a wall of erudition.”

— Roger Scruton

55. “The two most potent post-war orthodoxies – socialist politics and modernist art – have at least one feature in common: they are bothforms of snobbery, the anti-bourgeois snobbery of people convinced of their right to dictate to the common man in the name of the common man.”

— Roger Scruton

56. “The sexual parts are not only vivid examples of the body’s dominion; they are also apertures whose damp emissions and ammoniac smells testify to the mysterious putrefaction of the body.”

— Roger Scruton

57. “Kant’s position is extremely subtle – so subtle, indeed, that no commentator seems to agree with any other as to what it is.”

— Roger Scruton

58. “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.”

— Roger Scruton

59. “In the attacks on the old ways of doing things on word in particular came into currency. That word was “kitsch.” Once introduced, the word stuck. Whatever you do, it musn’t be kitsch. This became the first precept of the modernist artist in every medium.”

— Roger Scruton

60. “Like the pleasure of friendship, the pleasure in beauty is curious: it aims to understand its object, and to value what it finds.”

— Roger Scruton

61. “Sometimes the intention is to shock us. But what is shocking first time around is boring and vacuous when repeated.”

— Roger Scruton

62. “Science proposes something and then does everything it can to disprove it. Religion is not like that. It proposes something and does everything it can to keep it from being disproved.”

— Roger Scruton

63. “Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways... Yet it is never viewed with indifference; beauty demands to be noticed; it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend. If there are people who are indifferent to beauty, then it is surely because they do not perceive.”

— Roger Scruton

64. “The pageant of a former hour, Is Beauty in the Grave.”

— Roger Scruton

65. “Something of the child’s pure delight in creation survives in every true work of art.”

— Roger Scruton

66. “A civilization is a social entity that manifests religious, political, legal, and customary uniformity over an extended period, and which confers on its members the benefits of socially accumulated knowledge.”

— Roger Scruton

67. “A philosophy that begins in doubt assails what no-one believes, and invites us to nothing believable.”

— Roger Scruton

68. “Modernist buildings exclude dialogue, and the void that they create around themselves is not a public space but a desertification.”

— Roger Scruton

69. “We appreciate beautiful things not for their utility only, but also for what they are in themselves – or more plausibly, for how they appear in themselves.”

— Roger Scruton

70. “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.”

— Roger Scruton

71. “We are not born free, nor do we come into this world with a self-identity and autonomy of our own. We achieve those things, through the conflict and cooperation that weave us into the social fabric. We become freely choosing individuals only by acquiring obligations to parents, siblings, institutions and groups: obligations that we did not choose.”

— Roger Scruton

72. “Sanctions make a substantial contribution to power based on privation, and they have never hurt a single despot in the whole history of their use.”

— Roger Scruton

73. “Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.”

— Roger Scruton

74. “Had Heidegger attached his great ego to the cause of international socialism, he would have enjoyed the whitewash granted to Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Hobsbawm and the other apologists for the Gulag.1 But the cause of national socialism could enjoy no such convenient excuse, and the sin was compounded, in Heidegger’s case, by the fact that it was precisely the national, rather than the socialist aspect of the creed that had attracted him.”

— Roger Scruton

75. “I am not an advocate of Enlightenment. On the contrary, I see it as a form of light pollution, which prevents us from seeing the stars.”

— Roger Scruton

76. “A society no more exists for the satisfaction of human needs, than a plant exists for its own health.”

— Roger Scruton

77. “Whatever our religion and our private convictions, we are the collective inheritors of things both excellent and rare, and political life, for us, ought to have one overriding goal, which is to hold fast to those things, in order to pass them on to our children.”

— Roger Scruton

78. “Liberty is not the same thing as equality, and that those who call themselves liberals are far more interested in equalizing than in liberating their fellows.”

— Roger Scruton

79. “Judgement requires, then, the joint operation of sensibility and understanding. A mind without concepts would have no capacity to think; equally, a mind armed with concepts, but with no sensory data to which they could be applied, would have nothing to think about.”

— Roger Scruton

80. “States are more like people than they are like anything else: they exist by purpose, reason, suffering, and joy. And peace between states is also like peace between people. It involves the willing renunciation of purpose, in the mutual desire not to do, but to be.”

— Roger Scruton

81. “Human beings, in their settled condition, are animated by oikophilia: the love of the oikos, which means not only the home but the people contained in it, and the surrounding settlements that endow that home with lasting contours and an enduring smile.”

— Roger Scruton

82. “Take away religion, take away philosophy, take away the higher aims of art, and you deprive ordinary people of the ways in which they can represent their apartness. Human nature, once something to live up to, becomes something to live down to instead. Biological reductionism nurtures this ‘living down’, which is why people so readily fall for it. It makes cynicism respectable and degeneracy chic. It abolishes our kind, and with it our kindness.”

— Roger Scruton

83. “If one looks back to the French Revolution, one sees just how easy it is for the doctrine of “human rights” to become an instrument of the most appalling tyranny. It suffices to do as the Jacobins did – to abolish the judiciary, and replace it by “people’s courts.” Then anything can be done to anyone, in the name of the Rights of Man.”

— Roger Scruton

84. “There is a sort of mystery to kitsch. When did it begin? If it is just simply another name for faking emotions, it ought to have been a permanent part of the human condition.”

— Roger Scruton

85. “Affect not to despise beauty: no one is freed from its dominion; But regard it not a pearl of price – it is fleeting as the bow in the clouds.”

— Roger Scruton

86. “Nonsemes and mathemes stand next to each other in detached and mutually irrelevant jumbles. They lack the crucial valency that ties sentence to sentence in a truth-directed argument or formula to formula in a valid proof, and they can accumulate forever without getting to the point of saying or revealing what they mean.”

— Roger Scruton

87. “When many people individually get what they want, the result may be something they collectively dislike.”

— Roger Scruton

88. “In 1970s Britain, conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half-mad recluses.”

— Roger Scruton

89. “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.”

— Roger Scruton

90. “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.”

— Roger Scruton

91. “We are needy creatures, and our greatest need is for home – the place where we are, where we find protection and love. We achieve this home through representations of our own belonging, not alone but in conjunction with others. All our attempts to make our surroundings look right – through decorating, arranging, creating – are attempts to extend a welcome to ourselves and to those whom we love.”

— Roger Scruton

92. “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.”

— Roger Scruton

93. “In the face of sorrow, imperfection and the fleetingness of our affections and joys, we ask ourselves ‘why?’. We need reassurance. We look to art for the proof that life in this world is meaningful and that suffering is not the pointless thing that it so often appears to be, but the necessary part of a larger and redeeming whole.”

— Roger Scruton

94. “The contradictory nature of the socialist utopias is one explanation of the violence involved in the attempt to impose them: it takes infinite force to make people do what is impossible”.”

— Roger Scruton

95. “Toleration means being prepared to accept opinions that you intensely dislike. Likewise democracy means consenting to be governed by people whom you intensely dislike. This.”

— Roger Scruton

96. “Through sacred things we can influence and be influenced by the transcendental.”

— Roger Scruton

97. “For Medieval craftsmen, work was an act of piety and was sanctified in their own eyes as in the eyes of their God. For such labourers, end and means are one and he spiritual wholeness of faith is translated into the visual wholeness and purify of their craft. hence their craft was also art, a permanent testimony to the reality on earth of humanity’s spiritual redemption.”

— Roger Scruton

98. “Nor should we be surprised that it is absent from the world of the Islamists – even though forgiveness has an important place in the practice of Islam and in the morality of the Koran.4.”

— Roger Scruton

99. “The American liberal is certainly not averse to the power of the state, provided it is exerted by liberals, and exerted against conservatives.”

— Roger Scruton

100. “Some of the greatest achievements of modern philosophy result from the attempt to reconcile the belief in human freedom with the eternal laws of God’s nature, and among these achievements Spinoza’s is not only the most imaginative and profound, but perhaps the only one that is truly plausible.”

— Roger Scruton