352 Quotes by Roger Scruton

On the whole, I rather disapprove of cookbooks, except for the literary ones, like Elizabeth David's.

The robust English view used to be that the correct response to offensive words is to ignore them, or to answer them with a rebuke. If you invoke the law at all, it should be to protect the one who gives the offence, and not the one who takes it. Now, it seems, it is all the other way round.

Delia Smith is, actually, my bete noire. I consider her a most pernicious influence.

Faking is a social activity in which people act together to draw a veil over unwanted realities and encourage each other in the exercise of their illusory powers.

I am hostile to the idea that collective solutions have to be made by committees and then imposed top-down. I very much prefer bottom-up solutions.

Of course, it is the case that conservatism as I envisage it distances itself always from abstract conceptions and tries to find the concrete reality.

Ultimately, political order does not generate itself.

The Marxist theory of ideology is extremely contentious, not least because it is tied to socio-economic hypotheses that are no longer believable.

All political order presupposes a pre-political order, a sense that people belong together. And then, of course, they might seek a contract that embodies their togetherness. But the togetherness has to be there.