Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton was a British philosopher, writer, and university teacher who worked across philosophy, fiction, journalism, and music.
Born on 27 February 1944 in Buslingthorpe, Scruton attended the Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe before going on to the University of Cambridge. He also studied at City, University of London and the City Law School, accumulating a wide academic formation that underpinned his subsequent career in teaching and writing.
Throughout his life Scruton worked in a notably broad range of capacities — as a philosopher, novelist, journalist, musician, and university teacher — always writing in English. His standing in formal scholarly life was recognised through his election as a Fellow of the British Academy and as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He received further honours beyond Britain: the Czech Medal of Merit, honorary citizenship of Brno, and the title of Knight Bachelor. These recognitions, drawn from more than one country, attest to the reach of his career beyond his native United Kingdom.
He died on 12 January 2020 in Brinkworth. The professional identities he held — philosopher, teacher, novelist, journalist, musician — together with his fellowships in two of Britain's most distinguished learned societies and his knighthood, mark the formal acknowledgements of a working life sustained across several distinct disciplines and conducted in the English language.
Quotes by Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton's insights on:
The world of art, I have suggested, is full of fakes. Fake originality, fake emotion and the fake expertise of the critics - these are all around us and in such abundance that we hardly know where to look for the real thing. Or perhaps there is no real thing?
What the word conservative means is not putting things back but conserving them. There are things that are threatened and you love them, so you want to keep them.
My main argument is that environmental destruction comes when people externalise their costs and pass them on to future generations. That is obviously something that large enterprises do and they become large by doing it.
Given the right to - given the opportunity to vote, I voted for Brexit because I've never approved really of the European Union, I never approved of it because of its attempts to confiscate national sovereignty in all the issues that matter.
Certainly the multicultural activists in the Labour party and the universities wanted to destroy the old white Anglo-Saxon education system as they saw it, and produce something completely different - with no conception of what that completely different thing would be, of course.
Conservatives hold on to things not only because they are attached to them, but also because they do not see the sense in radical change, until someone has told them what it will lead to.
Perhaps the world of art is just one vast pretence, in which we all take part since, after all, there is no real cost to it, except to those like Charles Saatchi, rich enough to splash out on junk?
There is a chapter in 'Gentle Regrets' called 'Coming Home' which is really me expressing my later admiration for my father's public spirit.
I am a conservative thinker, well known as such, outspoken as such but reasonable in my view.