Roger Scruton Quotes - Page 2

The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation.

Sometimes the intention is to shock us. But what is shocking first time around is boring and vacuous when repeated.

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.

We should not value education as a means to prosperity, but prosperity as a means to education. Only then will our priorities be right. For education, unlike prosperity is an end in itself. .. power and influence come through the acquisition of useless knowledge. . . irrelevant subjects bring understanding of the human condition, by forcing the student to stand back from it.

Conservatives resonate to Burke's view of society, as a partnership between the living, the unborn and the dead.

The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy.

When truth cannot make itself known in words, it will make itself known in deeds.

Music addresses us from beyond the borders of the natural world

Private property is one of the best institutions which has ever evolved, to protect us from the bullying of others.

To teach virtue we must educate the emotions, and this means learning "what to feel" in the various circumstances that prompt them.

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.

Modernism in architecture went hand in hand with socialist and fascist projects to rid old Europe of its hierarchical past

Science proposes something and then does everything it can to disprove it. Religion is not like that. It proposes something and does everything it can to keep it from being disproved.

Creativity is not enough... the skill of the true artist is to show the real in the light of the ideal and so transfigure it.

The ethical life... is maintained in being by a common culture, which also upholds the togetherness of society... Unlike the modern youth culture, a common culture sanctifies the adult state, to which it offers rites of passage.

Classical buildings endure because they are loved, admired and accepted, and enjoy an innate adaption to human needs and purposes.

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 they’re not really answerable. I draw on art and literature, and music in particular, because music is a wonderful example of something that’s in this world but not of this world. Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.

Modernist buildings exclude dialogue, and the void that they create around themselves is not a public space but a desertification

If you consider only utility, the things you build will soon be useless... nobody wants to be in it.

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 we have no God-given right to destroy our inheritance, but must always patiently submit to the voice of order, and set an example of orderly living.

There are no chords in modernist architecture, only lines - lines that may come to an end, but that achieve no closure

Nothing is more useful than the useless.

The future of mankind, for the socialist, is simple: pull down the existing order and allow the future to emerge.

Like adverts, today's works of art aim to create a brand, even if they have no product to sell except themselves.

Faith exalts the human heart, by removing it from the market-place, making it sacred and unexchangeable. Under the jurisdiction of religion our deeper feelings are sacralized, so as to become raw material for the ethical life: the life lived in judgement.