Roger Scruton Quotes - Page 2

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• When truth cannot make itself known in words, it will make itself known in deeds.

  Roger Scruton

  Truth, Deeds, Known

  Roger Scruton (2009). “The Roger Scruton Reader”, p.95, A&C Black

  17 Copy quote

• To teach virtue we must educate the emotions, and this means learning "what to feel" in the various circumstances that prompt them.

  Roger Scruton

  Mean, Emotion, Virtue

  "Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged". Book by Roger Scruton, 2007.

  24 Copy quote

• There is a crucial distinction to be made between innovation and originality. The second, unlike the first, can never break with what preceded it: to be original, an artist must also belong to the tradition from which he departs. To put it another way, he must violate the expectations of his audience, but he must also, in countless ways, uphold and endorse them.

  Roger Scruton

  Artist, Expectations, Innovation

  48 Copy quote

• There’s a real question as to what beauty is and why it’s important to us. Many pseudo-philosophers try to answer these questions and tell us they’re not really answerable. I draw on art and literature, and music in particular, because music is a wonderful example of something that’s in this world but not of this world. Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.

  Roger Scruton

  Art, Real, Trying

  23 Copy quote

• When many people individually get what they want, the result may be something they collectively dislike.

  Roger Scruton

  People, May, Want

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  Roger Scruton

  Real, Creativity, Artist

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• The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy.

  Roger Scruton

  Anarchy, Abstract, Intellect

  Roger Scruton (2015). “Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life”, p.48, Bloomsbury Publishing

  18 Copy quote

• 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.

  Roger Scruton

  Modern Youth, Adults, Culture

  Roger Scruton (2006). “Modern Culture”, p.127, A&C Black

  10 Copy quote

• Modernism in architecture went hand in hand with socialist and fascist projects to rid old Europe of its hierarchical past

  Roger Scruton

  Past, Hands, Europe

  Roger Scruton (2006). “A political philosophy”, Continuum Intl Pub Group

  60 Copy quote

• Science proposes something and then does everything it can to disprove it. Religion is not like that. It proposes something and does everything it can to keep it from being disproved.

  Roger Scruton

  Atheist, Doe, Propose

  14 Copy quote

• 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.

  Roger Scruton

  Sacrifice, Culture, Demand

  Roger Scruton (2013). “Modern Culture”, p.5, Bloomsbury Publishing

  9 Copy quote

• Conservatives resonate to Burke's view of society, as a partnership between the living, the unborn and the dead.

  Roger Scruton

  Views, Partnership, Unborn

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• We should not value education as a means to prosperity, but prosperity as a means to education. Only then will our priorities be right. For education, unlike prosperity is an end in itself. .. power and influence come through the acquisition of useless knowledge. . . irrelevant subjects bring understanding of the human condition, by forcing the student to stand back from it.

  Roger Scruton

  Education, Mean, Priorities

  31 Copy quote

• The welfare state that is built upon this conception seems to prove precisely away from the conservative conception of authoritative and personal government, towards a labyrinthine privilege sodden structure of anonymous power, structuring a citizenship that is increasingly reluctant to answer for itself, increasingly parasitic on the dispensations of a bureaucracy towards which it can feel no gratitude.

  Roger Scruton

  Gratitude, Government, Apathy

  8 Copy quote

• Private property is one of the best institutions which has ever evolved, to protect us from the bullying of others.

  Roger Scruton

  Bullying, Institutions, Protect

  13 Copy quote

• Faith exalts the human heart, by removing it from the market-place, making it sacred and unexchangeable. Under the jurisdiction of religion our deeper feelings are sacralized, so as to become raw material for the ethical life: the life lived in judgement.

  Roger Scruton

  Heart, Judgement, Feelings

  Roger Scruton (2013). “Modern Culture”, p.91, Bloomsbury Publishing

  8 Copy quote

• Classical buildings endure because they are loved, admired and accepted, and enjoy an innate adaption to human needs and purposes.

  Roger Scruton

  Needs, Purpose, Building

  Roger Scruton (2009). “The Roger Scruton Reader”, p.169, A&C Black

  31 Copy quote

• Beauty is assailed from two directions - by the cult of ugliness in the arts, and by the cult of utility in everyday life.

  Roger Scruton

  Art, Two, Everyday

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• Sometimes the intention is to shock us. But what is shocking first time around is boring and vacuous when repeated.

  Roger Scruton

  Firsts, Sometimes, Boring

  16 Copy quote

• Architecture, like dress, is an exercise in good manners, and good manners involve the habit of skillful insincerity - the habit of saying "good morning" to those whose mornings you would rather blight, and of passing the butter to those you would rather starve.

  Roger Scruton

  Morning, Inspiration, Exercise

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• Nothing is more useful than the useless.

  Roger Scruton

  Useless

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  14 Copy quote

• If you consider only utility, the things you build will soon be useless... nobody wants to be in it.

  Roger Scruton

  Useless, Want, Architecture

  7 Copy quote

• There are no chords in modernist architecture, only lines - lines that may come to an end, but that achieve no closure

  Roger Scruton

  Lines, May, Architecture

  36 Copy quote

• The conservative response to modernity is to embrace it, but to embrace it critically, in full consciousness that human achievements are rare and precarious, that we have no God-given right to destroy our inheritance, but must always patiently submit to the voice of order, and set an example of orderly living.

  Roger Scruton

  Order, Voice, Achievement

  "A Political Philosophy". Book by Roger Scruton, 2006.

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