352 Quotes by Roger Scruton

  • Author Roger Scruton
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    18th century opera is packed with emotion, but contains not a trace of kitsch. Only with the 'thees' and 'thous' of Victorian poetry does the disease begin to grow in our poetic tradition.

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  • Author Roger Scruton
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    I do ask myself why I make people so enraged, because I only ever say what I think. And while I know it might not be everyone's point of view, that doesn't seem particularly intolerable to me.

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  • Author Roger Scruton
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    I know ideals aren't realities, but they do influence reality - social, legal, political, cultural.

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  • Author Roger Scruton
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    The real cure to immigration, obviously, is to make sure that there is prosperity around the world so that people don't have the motive. Not just prosperity, but freedom.

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  • Author Roger Scruton
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    Anyone can lie. One need only have the requisite intention - in other words, to say something with the intention to deceive. Faking, by contrast, is an achievement. To fake things you have to take people in, yourself included.

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  • Author Roger Scruton
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    Life at home wasn't very good and I had really left by the time I was 16 and didn't go back until after Cambridge when I went to look after my mother when she was dying.

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  • Author Roger Scruton
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    My 2018 ended with a hate storm, in response to my appointment as chair of the government's Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission.

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  • Author Roger Scruton
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    Cameron's resignation really was the death knell of the Conservative Party as we knew it because that's something a proper Conservative politician cannot do: renounce leadership at the moment when it's needed.

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  • Author Roger Scruton
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    Morality is like a field of flowers beneath which the corpses are piled in a thousand layers. It is an evolved mechanism whereby the human organism proceeds through life sustained on every side by bonds of mutual interest.

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