Roger Scruton Quotes - Page 3

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• The future of mankind, for the socialist, is simple: pull down the existing order and allow the future to emerge.

  Roger Scruton

  Simple, Order, Socialist

  Roger Scruton (2006). “A Political Philosophy”, p.208, A&C Black

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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.

  Roger Scruton

  Thinking, Differences, Judging

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• The relation of the soul to the body is like that of a house to its bricks. The soul is a principle of organisation, which governs the flesh and endows it with meaning. It is no more separable from the flesh than is the house from its bricks, even if the soul may survive the gradual replacement of every bodily part.

  Roger Scruton

  House, Soul, Principles

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• 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

  Sex, Smell, Example

  Roger Scruton (2015). “Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation”, p.152, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Fantasy consists in a morbid fascination with unrealities, which secretly transforms itself into a desire to make them real. Imagination is a form of intellectual control, which presents us with the image of unrealities in order that we should understand and feel distanced from them. In imagination we dominate; in fantasy, we are dominated.

  Roger Scruton

  Real, Order, Imagination

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

  Roger Scruton

  Space, Void, Building

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• Concerning no subject would [George Bernard] Shaw be deterred by the minor accident of total ignorance from penning a definitive opinion.

  Roger Scruton

  Ignorance, Opinion, Bernard Shaw

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• 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

  Religious, Civilization, Political

  Roger Scruton (2007). “Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged”, p.2, Encounter Books

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• [Burke] emphasized that the new forms of politics, which hope to organize society around the rational pursuit of liberty, equality, fraternity, or their modernist equivalents, are actually forms of militant irrationality.

  Roger Scruton

  Liberty, Fraternity, Form

  Roger Scruton (2009). “The Roger Scruton Reader”, p.10, A&C Black

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• Cognitive states of mind are seldom addictive, since they depend upon exploration of the world, and the individual encounter with the individual object, whose appeal is outside the subject's control. Addiction arises when the subject has full control over a pleasure and can ponder it at will. It is primarily a matter of sensory pleasure, and involves a kind of short-circuiting of the pleasure network. Addiction is characterized by a loss of the emotional dynamic that would otherwise govern an outward-directed, cognitively creative life.

  Roger Scruton

  Loss, Emotional, Addiction

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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.

  Roger Scruton

  Reality, Views, May

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• Wine is not just an object of pleasure, but an object of knowledge; and the pleasure depends on the knowledge.

  Roger Scruton

  Wine, Pleasure, Objects

  Roger Scruton (2013). “I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher's Guide to Wine”, p.22, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• The music takes over the words and makes them speak to me in another language.

  Roger Scruton

  Language, Speak

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• The art establishment has turned away from the old curriculum which puts beauty and craft at the top of the agenda.

  Roger Scruton

  Art, Agendas, Crafts

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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.

  Roger Scruton

  Beautiful, Religious, People

  Roger Scruton (2009). “Beauty: A Very Short Introduction”, p.14, OUP Oxford

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• Nothing is more useful than the useless.

  Roger Scruton

  Useless

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• Conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this lies the secret of its success.

  Roger Scruton

  Lying, Secret, Modernism

  Roger Scruton (2006). “A Political Philosophy”, p.194, A&C Black

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• Music exists when rhythmic, melodic or harmonic order is deliberately created, and consciously listened to, and it is only language-using, self-conscious creatures ... who are capable of organizing sounds in this way, either when uttering them or when perceiving them. We can hear music in the song of the nightingale, but it is music that no nightingale has heard.

  Roger Scruton

  Music, Song, Self

  Roger Scruton (2016). “Understanding Music: Philosophy and Interpretation”, p.13, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Were we to aim in every case at the kind of supreme beauty exemplified by Sta Maria della Salute, we should end with aesthetic overload. The clamorous masterpieces, jostling for attention side by side, would lose their distinctiveness, and the beauty of each of them would be at war with the beauty of the rest.

  Roger Scruton

  War, Would Be, Attention

  Roger Scruton (2011). “Beauty: A Very Short Introduction”, p.11, Oxford University Press

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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.

  Roger Scruton

  Party, Views, Imagination

  Roger Scruton (2015). “Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation”, p.139, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch.

  Roger Scruton

  Art, Desire, Kitsch

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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.

  Roger Scruton

  Subtle, Agree, Position

  Roger Scruton (2012). “Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey”, p.34, A&C Black

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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.

  Roger Scruton

  People, Diversity, Joy

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• 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

  Hurt, Use, Sanctions

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• Something of the child's pure delight in creation survives in every true work of art.

  Roger Scruton

  Art, Children, Delight

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