Roger Scruton famous quotes

05-13-2025

It is not the truth of Marxism that explains the willingness of intellectuals to believe it, but the power that it confers on intellectuals, in their attempts to control the world. And since, as Swift says, it is futile to reason someone out of a thing that he was not reasoned into, we can conclude that Marxism owes its remarkable power to survive every criticism to the fact that it is not a truth-directed but a power-directed system of thought.
-- Roger Scruton

#Philosophy #Believe #Political
Beauty matters. It is not just a subjective thing but a universal need of human beings. If we ignore this need we find ourselves in a spiritual desert.
-- Roger Scruton

#Spiritual #Needs #Desert
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
-- Roger Scruton

#Believe #Asking #Truth Is
Through the pursuit of beauty we shape the world as a home, and in doing so we both amplify our joys and find consolation for our sorrows.
-- Roger Scruton

#Home #Joy #Sorrow
A philosopher who says, 'There are no truths, only interpretations,' risks the retort: 'Is that true, or only an interpretation?'
-- Roger Scruton

#Risk #Philosopher #Retorts
Art and music shine a light of meaning on ordinary life, and through them we are able to confront the things that trouble us and to find consolation and peace in their presence.
-- Roger Scruton

#Art #Light #Shining
Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference: beauty demands to be noticed; it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend. If there are people who are indifferent to beauty, then it is surely because they do not perceive it.
-- Roger Scruton

#Beauty #Voice #People
In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.
-- Roger Scruton

#Firsts #Moral #Argument
It is not enough to be nice; you have to be good. We are attracted by nice people; but only on the assumption that their niceness is a sign of goodness.
-- Roger Scruton

#Nice #People #Assumption
The two most potent post-war orthodoxies--socialist politics and modernist art--have at least one feature in common: they are bothforms of snobbery, the anti-bourgeois snobbery of people convinced of their right to dictate to the common man in the name of the common man.
-- Roger Scruton

#Art #War #Men
When gifts are replaced by rights, so is gratitude replaced by claims. And claims breed resentment
-- Roger Scruton

#Gratitude #Rights #Resentment
In place of the old beliefs of a civilization based on godliness, judgment and historical loyalty, young people are given the new beliefs of a society based on equality and inclusion, and are told that the judgment of other lifestyles is a crime. ... The "non-judgmental" attitude towards other cultures goes hand-in-hand with a fierce denunciation of the culture that might have been one's own
-- Roger Scruton

#Loyalty #Attitude #Hands
The core of common culture is religion. Tribes survive and flourish because they have gods, who fuse many wills into a single will, and demand and reward the sacrifices on which social life depends.
-- Roger Scruton

#Sacrifice #Culture #Demand
The best evidence of a mind is when you change it
-- Roger Scruton

#Mind #Evidence
Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it does not matter.
-- Roger Scruton

#Our World #Doe #Vanishing
State solutions are imposed from above; they are often without corrective devices, and cannot easily be reversed on the proof of failure. Their inflexibility goes hand in hand with their planned and goal-directed nature, and when they fail the efforts of the state are directed not to changing them but to changing people’s belief that they have failed.
-- Roger Scruton

#Hands #People #Goal
There is a deep human need for beauty and if you ignore that need in architecture your buildings will not last
-- Roger Scruton

#Needs #Lasts #Architecture
Art once made a cult of beauty. Now we have a cult of ugliness instead. This has made art into an elaborate joke, one which by now has ceased to be funny.
-- Roger Scruton

#Art #Made #Cult
Being unpopular is never easy; but being unpopular in a good cause is a shield against despair.
-- Roger Scruton

#Despair #Shields #Causes
When art becomes merely shock value, our sense of humanity is slowly degraded.
-- Roger Scruton

#Art #Humanity #Shock
All of us need an identity which unites us with our neighbours, our countrymen, those people who are subject to the same rules and the same laws as us, those people with whom we might one day have to fight side by side to protect our inheritance, those people with whom we will suffer when attacked, those people whose destinies are in some way tied up with our own.
-- Roger Scruton

#Fighting #Destiny #Law
When truth cannot make itself known in words, it will make itself known in deeds.
-- Roger Scruton

#Truth #Deeds #Known
The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation.
-- Roger Scruton

#Consolation #Imaginary #Imaginary Things
The culture of a civilization is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.
-- Roger Scruton

#Art #Civilization #Vision
There is a crucial distinction to be made between innovation and originality. The second, unlike the first, can never break with what preceded it: to be original, an artist must also belong to the tradition from which he departs. To put it another way, he must violate the expectations of his audience, but he must also, in countless ways, uphold and endorse them.
-- Roger Scruton

#Artist #Expectations #Innovation

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