352 Quotes by Roger Scruton

There is a deep human need for beauty and if you ignore that need in architecture your buildings will not last.

I am not an advocate of Enlightenment. On the contrary, I see it as a form of light pollution, which prevents us from seeing the stars.

I say it was immediately apparent, but it was not apparent to the intellectual class, which has remained largely wedded to the post-war consensus to this day. The.

We appreciate beautiful things not for their utility only, but also for what they are in themselves – or more plausibly, for how they appear in themselves.

Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.

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

Nonsemes and mathemes stand next to each other in detached and mutually irrelevant jumbles. They lack the crucial valency that ties sentence to sentence in a truth-directed argument or formula to formula in a valid proof, and they can accumulate forever without getting to the point of saying or revealing what they mean.

We should not be surprised therefore if British conservative thinkers – notably Hume, Smith, Burke and Oakeshott – have tended to see no tension between a defence of the free market and a traditionalist vision of social order. For they have put their faith in the spontaneous limits placed on the market by the moral consensus of the community and have seen both the market and the constraints as the work of the same invisible hand. Maybe that moral consensus is now breaking down. But.

Accountability in public office is but one manifestation of this cultural inheritance, and we should not be surprised that it is the first thing to disappear when the utopians and the planners take over.