352 Quotes by Roger Scruton

"In its 'totalising' vision the left fails to distinguish civil society from the state, and fails to understand that the ends of life arise from our free associations and not from the coercive discipline of an egalitarian elite."

"The God of the philosophers disappeared behind the world, because he was described in the third person, and not addressed in the second."

"(...) jealousy is painful not least because it sees the object of love, once sacred, as now desecrated.One cure for the pain of desecration is the move towards total profanation: in other words, to wipe out all vestiges of sanctity from the once worshipped object, to make it merely a thing of the world, and not just a thing in the world, something that is nothing over and above the substitutes that can at any time replace it."

"Value begins where calculation ends, since that which matters most to us is the thing that we will not exchange."

"While he joined eagerly in the contemporary intellectual battles, philosophy was, for Spinoza, not a weapon but a way of life, a sacred order whose servants were transported to a supreme and certain blessedness."

"The search for a policy to overcome original sin is not a coherent political project."

"We must inevitably conclude, therefore, that the main influences over Spinoza’s thought during his formative years were not those philosophers, such as Descartes, to whom he later devoted his attention, but the Jewish and Muslim writers of earlier centuries, whose thoughts provided the main arguments of contemporary Judaism."

"Throughout his life Hayek wanted to affirm his identity with the classic liberal tradition, believing that the true cause of the crises leading to two world wars was the steady increase increase in the power of the state, and its misuse in the pursuit of unattainable goals. 'Social justice' was the name of one of these goals, and Hayek expressly dismissed the expression as a piece of deceptive Newspeak, used to advance large-scale injustice in the name of its opposite."

"In American popular usage today, 'liberalism' means left-liberalism – not to be confused with 'neoliberalism' ... and is expressly contrasted with 'conservatism'. In this usage a liberal is one who leans consciously towards the underprivileged, supports the interests of minorities and socially excluded groups, believes in the use of state power to achieve social justice, and in all probability shares the egalitarian and secular values of the nineteenth century socialists."

"At the same time, there flourished around them an equally remarkable, and for us more interesting, defiance of the Calvinist spirit: the art and culture of the Netherlands, in which man’s relation to the world of objects, and to his own physical life, became the subject of a profound spiritual interrogation."