352 Quotes by Roger Scruton

The worst mistake in politics is the mistake made by Lenin – the mistake of destroying the institutions and procedures whereby mistakes can be recognized. Something.

The Anglo-American tradition of constitutional thinking should be understood in this way, as addressing the question of how to limit the power of government, without losing its benefits. That.

Conservatism is not a matter of defending global capitalism at all costs, or securing the privileges of the few against the many. It is a matter of defending civil society, maintaining autonomous institutions, and defending the citizen against the abuse of power.

Contempt for the dead leads to the disenfranchisement of the unborn, and although that result is not perhaps inevitable, it has been repeated by all subsequent revolutions... Radical individualists enter the world without social capital of their own, and they consume all that they find.

Every form of social and political belief that lies before us today is related to the Romantic movement, for that is the archetype of our ongoing attempt to live by our own devices. This is more true of socialism than of conservatism, in fact – socialism being a kind of diseased nostalgia for the future, which is yet more damaging than nostalgia for the past.

That, in my view, is the truth in socialism, the truth of our mutual dependence, and of the need to do what we can to spread the benefits of social membership to those whose own efforts do not suffice to obtain them.

Top-down solutions have a tendency to confiscate problems from those whose problems they are.

And I saw that this desire to control society in the name of equality expresses exactly the contempt for human freedom that I encountered in Eastern Europe. There is indeed such a thing as society; but it is composed of individuals. And individuals must be free, which means being free from the insolent claims of those who wish to redesign them.

One thing is immediately apparent, and this is that many statements made in the first-person case are epistemologically privileged.