Roger Scruton Quotes

47 quotes in 704 categories

• States are more like people than they are like anything else: they exist by purpose, reason, suffering, and joy. And peace between states is also…
• Architecture, like dress, is an exercise in good manners, and good manners involve the habit of skillful insincerity - the habit of saying "good morning"…
• Sanctions make a substantial contribution to power based on privation, and they have never hurt a single despot in the whole history of their use.
• There’s a real question as to what beauty is and why it’s important to us. Many pseudo-philosophers try to answer these questions and tell us…
• 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…
• Beauty is assailed from two directions - by the cult of ugliness in the arts, and by the cult of utility in everyday life.
• The conservative response to modernity is to embrace it, but to embrace it critically, in full consciousness that human achievements are rare and precarious, that…
• 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.
• The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy.
• In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.
• Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it does not matter.
• Private property is one of the best institutions which has ever evolved, to protect us from the bullying of others.
• Marriage does not exist for the benefit of the present generation but for the benefit of the next
• The welfare state that is built upon this conception seems to prove precisely away from the conservative conception of authoritative and personal government, towards a…
• 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…
• Modernist buildings exclude dialogue, and the void that they create around themselves is not a public space but a desertification
• Modernism in architecture went hand in hand with socialist and fascist projects to rid old Europe of its hierarchical past
• There are no chords in modernist architecture, only lines - lines that may come to an end, but that achieve no closure
• There is a deep human need for beauty and if you ignore that need in architecture your buildings will not last
• Classical buildings endure because they are loved, admired and accepted, and enjoy an innate adaption to human needs and purposes.

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