352 Quotes by Roger Scruton

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.

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

Being unpopular is never easy; but being unpopular in a good cause is a shield against despair.

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

[T]o teach virtue we must educate the emotions, and this means learning "what to feel" in the various circumstances that prompt them.

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.

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

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.

All of us need an identity which unites us with our neighbours, our countrymen, those people who are subject to the same rules and the same laws as us, those people with whom we might one day have to fight side by side to protect our inheritance, those people with whom we will suffer when attacked, those people whose destinies are in some way tied up with our own.