Roger Scruton Quotes
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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.
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Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it does not matter.
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In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.
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To speak of beauty is to enter another and more exalted realm-a realm sufficiently apart from our everyday concerns as to be mentioned only with a certain hesitation. People who are always in praise and pursuit of the beautiful are an embarrassment, like people who make a constant display of their religious faith. Somehow, we feel such things should be kept for our exalted moments, and not paraded in company, or allowed to spill out over dinner.
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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.
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The future of mankind, for the socialist, is simple: pull down the existing order and allow the future to emerge.
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Like adverts, today's works of art aim to create a brand, even if they have no product to sell except themselves.
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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.
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Art has the ability to redeem life by finding beauty even in the worst aspect of things.
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Freedom can reside only in a point of view, a way of looking upon the system of necessity.Surely this is the one freedom that we may attain to: not to be released from physical reality, but to understand reality and ourselves as part of it, and so be reconciled to what we are.
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When art becomes merely shock value, our sense of humanity is slowly degraded.
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In all the areas of life where people have sought and found consolation through forbidding their desires-sex in particular, and taste in general-the habit of judgment is now to be stamped out.
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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.
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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.
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Creativity is not enough... the skill of the true artist is to show the real in the light of the ideal and so transfigure it.
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The best evidence of a mind is when you change it
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State solutions are imposed from above; they are often without corrective devices, and cannot easily be reversed on the proof of failure. Their inflexibility goes hand in hand with their planned and goal-directed nature, and when they fail the efforts of the state are directed not to changing them but to changing people’s belief that they have failed.
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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.
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Wine is not just an object of pleasure, but an object of knowledge; and the pleasure depends on the knowledge.
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In place of the old beliefs of a civilization based on godliness, judgment and historical loyalty, young people are given the new beliefs of a society based on equality and inclusion, and are told that the judgment of other lifestyles is a crime. ... The "non-judgmental" attitude towards other cultures goes hand-in-hand with a fierce denunciation of the culture that might have been one's own
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Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch.
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Private property is one of the best institutions which has ever evolved, to protect us from the bullying of others.
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Nothing is more useful than the useless.
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Something of the child's pure delight in creation survives in every true work of art.
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In literary representation, the distinction between the genuinely erotic and the licentious is a distinction not of subject-matter, but of perspective. The genuinely erotic work is one which invites the reader to re-create in imagination the first-person point of view of someone party to an erotic encounter. The pornographic work retains as a rule the third-person perspective of the voyeuristic observer.
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When gifts are replaced by rights, so is gratitude replaced by claims. And claims breed resentment
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Kant's position is extremely subtle - so subtle, indeed, that no commentator seems to agree with any other as to what it is.
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When truth cannot make itself known in words, it will make itself known in deeds.
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Sometimes the intention is to shock us. But what is shocking first time around is boring and vacuous when repeated.
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The ethical life... is maintained in being by a common culture, which also upholds the togetherness of society... Unlike the modern youth culture, a common culture sanctifies the adult state, to which it offers rites of passage.
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