Life at home wasn't very good and I had really left by the time I was 16 and didn't go back until… — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
To people like me, educated in post-war Britain, free speech has been a firm premise of the British way of life. — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
My life divides into three parts. In the first I was wretched; in the second ill at ease; in the third hunting. — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
I've spent my life arguing for greater respect between men and women and anyone who takes the time to read my books… — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
Beauty is assailed from two directions - by the cult of ugliness in the arts, and by the cult of utility in… — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude. — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
Art has the ability to redeem life by finding beauty even in the worst aspect of things. — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
“I think we can all see the force of the idea that there are certain things that cannot be done to human… — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
In all the areas of life where people have sought and found consolation through forbidding their desires-sex in particular, and taste in… — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
The ethical life... is maintained in being by a common culture, which also upholds the togetherness of society... Unlike the modern youth… — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
In the traditional dances, physical contact was permitted in a way that it wasn't in everyday life. The electricity of physical contact… — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
Art and music shine a light of meaning on ordinary life, and through them we are able to confront the things that… — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
“There is, in the circumstances of modern life, only one solution to the problem of resentment, and that is social mobility. The… — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
“Decisions are free when each of us settles his path through life by negotiation, playing his cards according to his own best… — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
“GK Chesterton once said that to criticise religion because it leads people to kill each other is like criticising love because it… — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
“Locke’s essay on Toleration of 1689 argued for the toleration of opinions and ways of life with which you do not agree,… — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
“Spinoza left a celebrated description of his life’s endeavour: After experience had taught me that all things which frequently take place in… — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
“The doctrine of Original sin, which is contained in the story of Genesis – one of the most beautiful concentrated metaphors in… — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
Morality is like a field of flowers beneath which the corpses are piled in a thousand layers. It is an evolved mechanism… — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
Conservatives resonate to Burke's view of society, as a partnership between the living, the unborn and the dead. — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
The core of common culture is religion. Tribes survive and flourish because they have gods, who fuse many wills into a single… — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
In the absence of organized religion, the only vehicle for redemption is art - not just the fragmentary arts of painting or… — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
The conservative response to modernity is to embrace it, but to embrace it critically, in full consciousness that human achievements are rare… — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
“Belief without any practice is of no use to us. But there are two sides to religious practice: one is the ritualistic,… — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it does not matter. — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
“So conceived, the English police force served to emphasize a fundamental truth about the English law, which is that it exists not to control… — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
My 2018 ended with a hate storm, in response to my appointment as chair of the government's Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission. — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
I've never been an optimist, but that's fine because pessimists have the possibility of being agreeably surprised. — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
Unlike every other product that is now manufactured for the table, wine exists in as many varieties as there are people who produce it.… — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy. — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
“I think we can all see the force of the idea that there are certain things that cannot be done to human beings –… — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
When art becomes merely shock value, our sense of humanity is slowly degraded. — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
“Western democracies did not create the virtue of citizenship; on the contrary, they grew from it. Nothing is more evident in The Federalist than… — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
“If one looks back to the French Revolution, one sees just how easy it is for the doctrine of “human rights” to become an… — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
“I say it was immediately apparent, but it was not apparent to the intellectual class, which has remained largely wedded to the post-war consensus… — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
Conservatives hold on to things not only because they are attached to them, but also because they do not see the sense in radical… — Roger Scruton Copy Share Image
