Top 180 Roger Scruton Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “The very same ‘mystery’ that veils the human person from the neurophysiologist veils human history from the Marxian determinist and human morality from the sociobiologist.”

— Roger Scruton

102. “Accountability in public office is but one manifestation of this cultural inheritance, and we should not be surprised that it is the first thing to disappear when the utopians and the planners take over.”

— Roger Scruton

103. “Free speech is not the cause of the tensions that are growing around us, but the only possible solution to them.”

— Roger Scruton

104. “But this experience taught me that our civilization cannot survive if we continue to appease the Islamists.”

— Roger Scruton

105. “Whose freedom, how exercised, how circumscribed and how defined?”

— Roger Scruton

106. “In the Judaeo-Christian tradition all this is well known, and incorporated into the sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church as well as the rituals and liturgy of Yom Kippur.”

— Roger Scruton

107. “Jack regarded himself as locked in a lifelong struggle with this establishment, on behalf of the Anglo-Saxon peasantry whose birthright had been stolen a thousand years earlier by the Norman knights.”

— Roger Scruton

108. “The greatest modern philosopher was moved by nothing more than by duty. His life, in consequence, was unremarkable.”

— Roger Scruton

109. “The two goals of liberation and social justice are not obviously compatible, any more than were the liberty and equality advocated at the French Revolution. If liberation involves the liberation of individual potential, how do we stop the ambitious, the energetic, the intelligent, the good-looking and the strong from getting ahead, and what should we allow ourselves by way of constraining them?”

— Roger Scruton

110. “The identification of any object in the first-person case is ruled out by the enterprise of scientific explanation. So science cannot tell me who I am, let alone where, when, or how.”

— Roger Scruton

111. “Left-wing politics has discarded the revolutionary paradigm advanced by the New Left, in favour of bureaucratic routines and the institutionalization of the welfare culture. The two goals of liberation and social justice remain in place: but they are promoted by legislation, committees and government commissions empowered to root out the sources of discrimination. Liberation and social justice have been bureaucratized.”

— Roger Scruton

112. “Once we distinguish race and culture, the way is open to acknowledge that not all cultures are equally admirable, and that not all cultures can exist comfortably side by side. To.”

— Roger Scruton

113. “John O’Sullivan has forcefully argued that the simultaneous presence in the highest offices of Reagan, Thatcher and Pope John Paul II was the cause of the Soviet collapse.”

— Roger Scruton

114. “The fictions were far more persuasive than the facts, and more persuasive than both was the longing to be caught up in a mass movement of solidarity, with the promise of emancipation at the end. My father’s grievances were real and well founded. But his solutions were dreams.”

— Roger Scruton

115. “Maybe a knowledge of literature and history was of no immediate benefit to a soldier in the ranks during the second world war; without it, however, it would have been impossible for Churchill to exert the kind of leadership that distinguished him, and which aroused even in the most uneducated the sense that far more was at stake than he could easily define.”

— Roger Scruton

116. “The heretic is the one who speaks against the community from a place within its territory. He is the enemy within. The heathen, by contrast, is safely behind the walls, excluded by his own invincible arrogance.”

— Roger Scruton

117. “The personal eludes biology in just the way that the face in the picture eludes the theory of pigments. The personal is not an addition to the biological: it emerges from it, in something like the way the face emerges from the colored patches on a canvas.”

— Roger Scruton

118. “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.”

— Roger Scruton

119. “And in answering that question he saw the inside of that bleak Viking world, the reality of love and compassion that all these hammer-throwing and skull-smashing gods concealed. That.”

— Roger Scruton

120. “Top-down government breeds irresponsible individuals, and the confiscation of civil society by the state leads to a widespread refusal among the citizens to act for themselves.”

— Roger Scruton

121. “Spinoza wrote the last indisputable Latin masterpiece, and one in which the refined conceptions of medieval philosophy are finally turned against themselves and destroyed entirely. He chose a single word from that language for his device: caute – ‘be cautious’ – inscribed beneath a rose, the symbol of secrecy. For, having chosen to write in a language that was so widely intelligible, he was compelled to hide what he had written.”

— Roger Scruton

122. “Given that Europe’s legacy to the world consists in the two great goods of Christianity and democracy it is hardly surprising if the EU no longer has the endorsement of the European people, even if it has created a network of clients upon whose support it can always rely.”

— Roger Scruton

123. “There are many American conservatives, including those influenced by the Roman Catholic tradition of natural law philosophy, who believe that, in the end, the conservative position rests on theological foundations.”

— Roger Scruton

124. “Contact with secular and Christian ways of thinking increased Spinoza’s dissatisfaction with the biblical interpretations he received from the rabbis, who in turn frowned on his interest in natural science, and on his study of the pernicious Latin language, in which so much heresy and blasphemy had been so engagingly expressed.”

— Roger Scruton

125. “Strident minorities, acting on the growing disposition to censor their opponents, ensure that the deeper the question, the more likely it is to be settled by shallow arguments.”

— Roger Scruton

126. “We should not be surprised therefore if British conservative thinkers – notably Hume, Smith, Burke and Oakeshott – have tended to see no tension between a defence of the free market and a traditionalist vision of social order. For they have put their faith in the spontaneous limits placed on the market by the moral consensus of the community and have seen both the market and the constraints as the work of the same invisible hand. Maybe that moral consensus is now breaking down. But.”

— Roger Scruton

127. “Moreover, since it is in the nature of tastes to differ, how can a standard erected by one person’s taste be used to cast judgement on another’s? How, for example, can we pretend that one type of music is superior or inferior to another when comparative judgements merely reflect the taste of the one who makes them?”

— Roger Scruton

128. “It is to overlook the culture that has focused, down the centuries, on the business of repentance.”

— Roger Scruton

129. “Nonsense has taken up residence in the heart of public debate and also in the academy. This nonsense is part of the huge fund of unreason on which the plans and schemes of optimists draw for their vitality. Nonsense confiscates meaning. It thereby puts truth and falsehood, reason and unreason, light and darkness on an equal footing. It is a blow cast in defence of intellectual freedom, as the optimists construe it, namely the freedom to believe anything at all, provided you feel better for it.”

— Roger Scruton

130. “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.”

— Roger Scruton

131. “Throughout his life Hayek wanted to affirm his identity with the classic liberal tradition, believing that the true cause of the crises leading to two world wars was the steady increase increase in the power of the state, and its misuse in the pursuit of unattainable goals. ‘Social justice’ was the name of one of these goals, and Hayek expressly dismissed the expression as a piece of deceptive Newspeak, used to advance large-scale injustice in the name of its opposite.”

— Roger Scruton

132. “Christians are under an obligation to bear witness to their faith, but this does not mean inflicting their faith on other people or forcibly requiring them to adopt it. As the founder of the Christian faith showed, you bear witness not through triumphing over your rivals but through submitting to their judgement.”

— Roger Scruton

133. “Art moves us because it is beautiful, and it is beautiful in part because it means something. It can be meaningful without being beautiful; but to be beautiful it must be meaningful.”

— Roger Scruton

134. “In discussing tradition, we are not discussing arbitrary rules and conventions. We are discussing answers that have been discovered to enduring questions. These.”

— Roger Scruton

135. “The freedom to entertain and express opinions, however offensive to others, has been regarded since Locke as the sine qua non of a free society. This.”

— Roger Scruton

136. “That, in my view, is the truth in socialism, the truth of our mutual dependence, and of the need to do what we can to spread the benefits of social membership to those whose own efforts do not suffice to obtain them.”

— Roger Scruton

137. “The French Revolution sought to replace one religion with another: hence its fanaticism and exterminatory zeal. But the new religion of the nation was demonic, fraught with contradiction and self-hatred, with no power to survive. It quickly gave way to the Napoleonic project of empire, through which violence was externalized and a rule of law re-established at home.”

— Roger Scruton

138. “Robert Conquest once announced three laws of politics, the first of which says that everyone is right-wing in the matters he knows about.”

— Roger Scruton

139. “Nobody who is alert to beauty, therefore, is without the concept of redemption – of a final transcendence of mortal disorder into a ‘kingdom of ends’. In an age of declining faith art bears enduring witness to the spiritual hunger and immortal longings of our species. Hence aesthetic education matters more today than at any previous period in history.”

— Roger Scruton

140. “The problems of philosophy and the systems designed to solve them are formulated in terms which tend to refer, not to the realm of actuality, but to the realms of possibility and necessity: to what might be and what must be, rather than to what is.”

— Roger Scruton

141. “Classical liberalism tells of the growth of individual liberty against the power of the sovereign. Socialism tells of the steadily increasing equality brought about by the state at the expense of the entrenched hierarchies of social power.”

— Roger Scruton

142. “Top-down solutions have a tendency to confiscate problems from those whose problems they are.”

— Roger Scruton

143. “I saw that this desire to control society in the name of equality expresses exactly the contempt for human freedom that I encountered in Eastern Europe. There.”

— Roger Scruton

144. “Realism... is a kind of disappointed tribute to the ideal.”

— Roger Scruton

145. “We’ve got to stand up not only for free speech, but also for all that we’ve inherited from the Enlightenment and from Christianity.”

— Roger Scruton

146. “A society governed by consent does not necessarily issue from a social contract, whether actual or implied. It is a society in which dealings between citizens, and between citizens and those in authority, are consensual, in the manner of daily courtesies, games of football, theatrical events or family meals. As Adam Smith made clear, order may emerge from consensual dealings. But it emerges ‘by an invisible hand’, and not, as a rule, because someone has imposed it. In.”

— Roger Scruton

147. “The author assumed that the main task of government is to distribute the collective wealth of society among its members, and that, in the matter of distribution, the government is uniquely competent. The fact that wealth can be distributed only if it is first created seemed to have escaped his notice.”

— Roger Scruton

148. “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.”

— Roger Scruton

149. “The slaves had been liberated, and turned into morons.”

— Roger Scruton

150. “When the judge asks me why I put poison in my wife’s tea, he will not be satisfied by my saying ‘Because electrical impulses from my brain caused my hand to reach for the bottle of arsenic and tip it into the waiting teacup’...”

— Roger Scruton