Top 180 Roger Scruton Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “The most interesting aspect of this culture of repudiation has been the attack on the central place accorded to reason in human affairs by the writers, philosophers and political theorists of the Enlightenment. The old.”

— Roger Scruton

152. “In general we should be aware of, and protective towards, those precious legal instruments that we already possess, and which often depend on principles of equity and natural law and not on top-down legislation.”

— Roger Scruton

153. “Opportunities are enhanced not by closing things down, but by opening things up. It is by allowing autonomous institutions to grow, by protecting the space in which they flourish, and.”

— Roger Scruton

154. “Free speech is a sign of a strong first-person plural, which enables people who disagree over fundamental things to live together in a condition of mutual toleration.”

— Roger Scruton

155. “The greatest task on the right, therefore, is to rescue the language of politics: to put within our grasp what has been forcibly removed from it by jargon.”

— Roger Scruton

156. “In its ‘totalising’ vision the left fails to distinguish civil society from the state, and fails to understand that the ends of life arise from our free associations and not from the coercive discipline of an egalitarian elite.”

— Roger Scruton

157. “In place of top-down government, Burke made the case for a society shaped from below, by traditions that have grown from our natural need to associate. The important social traditions are not just arbitrary customs, which might or might not have survived into the modern world. They are forms of knowledge. They contain the residues of many trials and errors, as people attempt to adjust their conduct to the conduct of others. To.”

— Roger Scruton

158. “The worst mistake in politics is the mistake made by Lenin – the mistake of destroying the institutions and procedures whereby mistakes can be recognized. Something.”

— Roger Scruton

159. “Conservatism is not a matter of defending global capitalism at all costs, or securing the privileges of the few against the many. It is a matter of defending civil society, maintaining autonomous institutions, and defending the citizen against the abuse of power.”

— Roger Scruton

160. “Liberals saw political order as issuing from individual liberty; conservatives saw individual liberty as issuing from political order. What makes a political order legitimate, in the conservative view, is not the free choices that create it, but the free choices that it creates.”

— Roger Scruton

161. “The God of the philosophers disappeared behind the world, because he was described in the third person, and not addressed in the second.”

— Roger Scruton

162. “For a certain kind of temperament, defeat is never defeat by reality, but always defeat by other people, often acting together as members of a class, tribe, conspiracy or clan.”

— Roger Scruton

163. “For the conservative, human beings come into this world burdened by obligations, and subject to institutions and traditions that contain within them a precious inheritance of wisdom, without which the exercise of freedom is as likely to destroy human rights and entitlements as to enhance them.”

— Roger Scruton

164. “Contempt for the dead leads to the disenfranchisement of the unborn, and although that result is not perhaps inevitable, it has been repeated by all subsequent revolutions... Radical individualists enter the world without social capital of their own, and they consume all that they find.”

— Roger Scruton

165. “People discovered, in their personal lives, that civil society is not goal-directed. It comes into being, in whatever circumstances, as an end in itself, a form of life that is appreciated for what it is, not for what it does.”

— Roger Scruton

166. “The Anglo-American tradition of constitutional thinking should be understood in this way, as addressing the question of how to limit the power of government, without losing its benefits. That.”

— Roger Scruton

167. “Western democracies did not create the virtue of citizenship; on the contrary, they grew from it. Nothing is more evident in The Federalist than the public spirit that it puts in play, in opposition to factions, cabals and private scheming. As.”

— Roger Scruton

168. “One thing is immediately apparent, and this is that many statements made in the first-person case are epistemologically privileged.”

— Roger Scruton

169. “Every form of social and political belief that lies before us today is related to the Romantic movement, for that is the archetype of our ongoing attempt to live by our own devices. This is more true of socialism than of conservatism, in fact – socialism being a kind of diseased nostalgia for the future, which is yet more damaging than nostalgia for the past.”

— Roger Scruton

170. “The wars of the twentieth century brought home the fundamental truth that people will fight for their country and unite in its defence, but will seldom fight for their class, even when the intellectuals are egging them on. At.”

— Roger Scruton

171. “Once we start to celebrate ugliness, we become ugly to.”

— Roger Scruton

172. “At the very moment when universities are advocating diversity as a fundamental academic value, the true diversity for which a university should make a stand, namely diversity of opinion, has been steadily eroded and in many places destroyed entirely.”

— Roger Scruton

173. “And 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 is indeed such a thing as society; but it is composed of individuals. And individuals must be free, which means being free from the insolent claims of those who wish to redesign them.”

— Roger Scruton

174. “Smith emphasized that trust, responsibility and accountability exist only in a society that respects them, and only where the spontaneous fruit of human sympathy is allowed to ripen. It is where sympathy, duty and virtue achieve their proper place that self-interest leads, by an invisible hand, to a result that benefits everyone.”

— Roger Scruton

175. “When society is organized from above, either by the top-down government of a revolutionary dictatorship, or by the impersonal edicts of an inscrutable bureaucracy, then accountability rapidly disappears from the political order, and from society too. 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

176. “It seems to me, therefore, that you should prepare your children to be happy in the way that you are happy. Treat them exactly as you would if your own ideals were generally shared. After all, your ideals, like your children, define you: between them, they are all that you have.”

— Roger Scruton

177. “If you ask yourself, why was it that communism finally collapsed, there wasn’t any external force causing it to do so, it collapsed largely because the Poles woke up to their sense of national identity.”

— Roger Scruton

178. “I never swallowed in its entirety the free-market rhetoric of the Thatcherites. But I deeply sympathized with Thatcher’s motives. She wanted the electorate to recognize that the individual’s life is his own and the responsibility of living it cannot be borne by anyone else, still less by the state. She hoped to release the talent and enterprise that, notwithstanding decades of egalitarian claptrap, she believed yet to exist in British society. The.”

— Roger Scruton

179. “The vast and destructive influence of Marxist theory is a clear disproof of what it says.”

— Roger Scruton

180. “Religious quarrels,’ he added, ’do not arise so much from ardent zeal for religion, as from men’s various dispositions and love of contradiction, which causes them habitually to distort and condemn everything, however rightly it may have been said.”

— Roger Scruton

181. “The common law of England is proof that there is a real distinction between legitimate and illegitimate power, that power can exist without oppression, and that authority is a living force in human conduct. English law, I discovered, is the answer to Foucault.”

— Roger Scruton

182. “And so I acquired the consciousness of death and dying, without which the world cannot be loved for what it is. That, in essence, is what it means to be a conservative.”

— Roger Scruton

183. “We should distinguish national loyalty from nationalism. National loyalty involves a love of home and a preparedness to defend it; nationalism is a belligerent ideology, which uses national symbols in order to conscript the people to war.”

— Roger Scruton

184. “Kitsch is fake art, expressing fake emotions, whose purpose is to deceive the consumer into thinking he feels something deep and serious, when in fact he feels nothing at all.”

— Roger Scruton

185. “The most important input into conservative thinking is the desire to sustain the networks of familiarity and trust on which a community depends for its longevity. Conservatism is what its name says it is: the attempt to conserve the community that we have.”

— Roger Scruton

186. “What makes a political order legitimate, in the conservative view, is not the free choices that create it, but the free choices that it creates.”

— Roger Scruton

187. “Originality requires learning, hard work, the mastery of a medium and – most of all – the refined sensibility and openness to experience that have suffering and solitude as their normal cost.”

— Roger Scruton

188. “I have argued that the political process, as we in Western democracies have inherited it, depends upon citizenship, which in turn depends upon a viable first-person plural. And in the previous chapter I gave what to me are incontrovertible arguments for construing that first-person plural in national terms. No such first-person plural can emerge in a society divided against itself, in which local antagonisms and class war eclipse every understanding of a shared destiny.”

— Roger Scruton