352 Quotes by Roger Scruton

What makes us human is that we ask questions. All the animals have interests, instincts and conceptions. All the animals frame for themselves an idea of the world in which they live. But we alone question our surroundings.

No, I don't think I've ever really favoured English independence. My view is that if the Scots want to be independent then we should aim for the same thing.

In art it is always as though the question is what the work of art is really about.

One must recognise what all religious people know, which is that human beings are imperfect and fallen and there's no way in which they alone can surmount the problems which they create.

If you say something in advance - if you describe a problem as it arises, people always turn on you because they don't want to hear about it. But when it's too late to do anything, they will then turn around and say that you were right. That's human nature.

Politics is a matter of day-to-day improvisation, and it often seems as though the major parties are guided only by the desire to stay in office and not by any philosophy that might justify their doing so.

For Conservatives, all disputes over law, liberty and justice are addressed to a historic and existing community. The root of politics, they believe, is attachment - the motive in human beings that binds them to the place, the customs, the history and the people who are theirs.

The language of politics is spoken in the first-person plural, and for Conservatives, the duty of the politician is to maintain that first-person plural in being.

Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.