Philosophy Quotes
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If you're going to have a free economy, one in which the ordinary citizen can dispose of his own income, you're going to have people who dispose of it in an anti-social way.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
I do ask myself why I make people so enraged, because I only ever say what I think. And while I know it might not be everyone's point of view, that doesn't seem particularly intolerable to me.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
Life at home wasn't very good and I had really left by the time I was 16 and didn't go back until after Cambridge when I went to look after my mother when she was dying.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
My little book of stories, 'Souls in the Twiligh,' may have to stand in for all the other things I have wanted to write in my retirement.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
I've spent my life arguing for greater respect between men and women and anyone who takes the time to read my books or listen to my lectures will realise this.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
I am hostile to the idea that collective solutions have to be made by committees and then imposed top-down. I very much prefer bottom-up solutions.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
Look at what left-wing movements were like in the 19th century - they were all about progress, the engineering of the world, the reshaping of nature, and so on. It's only postwar, really, that people on the left have come to see the environment as a critical issue.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
The real cure to immigration, obviously, is to make sure that there is prosperity around the world so that people don't have the motive. Not just prosperity, but freedom.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
America has this wonderful ability to recover from its own mistakes, which is why it's so hugely superior to China.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
Abstract ideas like equality and liberty have a spurious transparency, and can be used to derive pleasing theorems in the manner of Jean-Jacques Rousseau or John Rawls.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
Conservatism is about freedom, yes. But it is also about the institutions and attitudes that shape the responsible citizen, and ensure that freedom is a benefit to us all. Conservatism is therefore also about the limits to freedom.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
Anyone can lie. One need only have the requisite intention - in other words, to say something with the intention to deceive. Faking, by contrast, is an achievement. To fake things you have to take people in, yourself included.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
The Marxist theory of ideology is extremely contentious, not least because it is tied to socio-economic hypotheses that are no longer believable.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
The world of art, I have suggested, is full of fakes. Fake originality, fake emotion and the fake expertise of the critics - these are all around us and in such abundance that we hardly know where to look for the real thing. Or perhaps there is no real thing?
Quote by -Roger Scruton
Perhaps the world of art is just one vast pretence, in which we all take part since, after all, there is no real cost to it, except to those like Charles Saatchi, rich enough to splash out on junk?
Quote by -Roger Scruton
You cannot own a symphony or a novel in the way you can own a Damien Hirst. As a result there are far fewer fake symphonies or fake novels than there are fake works of visual art.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
For many artists and critics, beauty is a discredited idea. It denotes the saccharine sylvan scenes and cheesy melodies that appealed to Granny.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
The great benefit of philosophy, which is also its great weakness, is that all its steps are taken in the spirit of doubt.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
The true face of religion belongs to the re-enchantment of our injured civilization; faith is a way of filling all the spiritual spaces in our damaged world with the vision of a loving God, the God described in the Qur'an as al-Rahman al-Rahim.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
Conservatives hold on to things not only because they are attached to them, but also because they do not see the sense in radical change, until someone has told them what it will lead to.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
If, as many people believe, there is a God, and that God made us in his own image, then of course we are distinct from nature, just as He is.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
Whether it is a garden gnome, the sound of Bing Crosby launching into 'White Christmas', the blinking innocent eyes of Bambi or the words of Patience Strong, the kitsch phenomenon is there as strong and recognisable as your mother's face. You seldom if ever have the question, whether this is kitsch or not. If you think it might be, then it is.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
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.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
Given the right to - given the opportunity to vote, I voted for Brexit because I've never approved really of the European Union, I never approved of it because of its attempts to confiscate national sovereignty in all the issues that matter.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
For two centuries the English countryside has been an icon of national identity and the loved reminder of our island home. Yet the government is bent on littering the hills with wind turbines and the valleys with high speed railways.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
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.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
Faking is a social activity in which people act together to draw a veil over unwanted realities and encourage each other in the exercise of their illusory powers.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
I am a conservative thinker, well known as such, outspoken as such but reasonable in my view.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
But the European Union does not have a concept of national identity. It was set up to abolish that idea, not to abolish German national identity because that was trying to save itself.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
The robust English view used to be that the correct response to offensive words is to ignore them, or to answer them with a rebuke. If you invoke the law at all, it should be to protect the one who gives the offence, and not the one who takes it. Now, it seems, it is all the other way round.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
What makes us human is that we ask questions. All the animals have interests, instincts and conceptions. All the animals frame for themselves an idea of the world in which they live. But we alone question our surroundings.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
I love Viennese waltzes and polkas, and especially ceilidhs and old-fashioned formation dancing.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
Conservative voters tend to believe that the 'climate change' agenda has been foisted upon us by an unaccountable lobby of politicised intellectuals.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
The Scottish desire for independence is, to some extent, a fabrication. They want to identify themselves as Scots but still to be part of a, to enjoy the subsidy they get from being part of the kingdom.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
To live with someone who likes you, and whose judgement you respect, because you love them, does make quite a difference, I find.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
One of the questions that has most bothered me in my reflections on culture is the question of kitsch. Just what is it? When did it begin? And why?
Quote by -Roger Scruton
I've never been an optimist, but that's fine because pessimists have the possibility of being agreeably surprised.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
The main aim of conservative politicians is to get through to the next election without being noticed. Nothing is more embarrassing to them than a person who claims not only to share their beliefs but also to be inclined to put them into practice.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
All political order presupposes a pre-political order, a sense that people belong together. And then, of course, they might seek a contract that embodies their togetherness. But the togetherness has to be there.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
Certainly the multicultural activists in the Labour party and the universities wanted to destroy the old white Anglo-Saxon education system as they saw it, and produce something completely different - with no conception of what that completely different thing would be, of course.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
18th century opera is packed with emotion, but contains not a trace of kitsch. Only with the 'thees' and 'thous' of Victorian poetry does the disease begin to grow in our poetic tradition.
Quote by -Roger Scruton
Under the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006, it is an offence to stir up hatred towards religious and racial groups. 'Stirring up hatred' is an expression both loaded and undefined. Do I stir up hatred towards a religious group by criticising its beliefs in outspoken terms?
Quote by -Roger Scruton