352 Quotes by Roger Scruton

Beauty matters. It is not just a subjective thing but a universal need of human beings. If we ignore this need we find ourselves in a spiritual desert.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A philosopher who says, 'There are no truths, only interpretations,' risks the retort: 'Is that true, or only an interpretation?'

Marriage does not exist for the benefit of the present generation but for the benefit of the next