352 Quotes by Roger Scruton

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.

The philosopher and the scientist emphasize different features of the world, follow different interests and inspire different passions in the soul. But the aim of their study is in each case the same: the supreme good which consists in the adequate knowledge of God

Some of the greatest achievements of modern philosophy result from the attempt to reconcile the belief in human freedom with the eternal laws of God’s nature, and among these achievements Spinoza’s is not only the most imaginative and profound, but perhaps the only one that is truly plausible.

Ideological opinion is not merely distinct from knowledge but the enemy of knowledge.

The American liberal is certainly not averse to the power of the state, provided it is exerted by liberals, and exerted against conservatives.

Had Heidegger attached his great ego to the cause of international socialism, he would have enjoyed the whitewash granted to Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Hobsbawm and the other apologists for the Gulag.1 But the cause of national socialism could enjoy no such convenient excuse, and the sin was compounded, in Heidegger’s case, by the fact that it was precisely the national, rather than the socialist aspect of the creed that had attracted him.

England for him was no longer a real place, but a consecrated isle in the lake of forgetting, where the God of the English still strode through an imaginary Eden, admiring His works.