352 Quotes by Roger Scruton

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.

Judgement requires, then, the joint operation of sensibility and understanding. A mind without concepts would have no capacity to think; equally, a mind armed with concepts, but with no sensory data to which they could be applied, would have nothing to think about.

Realism... is a kind of disappointed tribute to the ideal.

The greatest modern philosopher was moved by nothing more than by duty. His life, in consequence, was unremarkable.

In the attacks on the old ways of doing things on word in particular came into currency. That word was “kitsch.” Once introduced, the word stuck. Whatever you do, it musn’t be kitsch. This became the first precept of the modernist artist in every medium.

Classical liberalism tells of the growth of individual liberty against the power of the sovereign. Socialism tells of the steadily increasing equality brought about by the state at the expense of the entrenched hierarchies of social power.

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.

If one looks back to the French Revolution, one sees just how easy it is for the doctrine of “human rights” to become an instrument of the most appalling tyranny. It suffices to do as the Jacobins did – to abolish the judiciary, and replace it by “people’s courts.” Then anything can be done to anyone, in the name of the Rights of Man.

Opportunities are enhanced not by closing things down, but by opening things up. It is by allowing autonomous institutions to grow, by protecting the space in which they flourish, and.