Roger Scruton Quotes

Democracies owe their existence to national loyalties — the loyalties that are supposedly shared by government and opposition, by all political parties, and by the electorate as a whole. Wherever the experience of nationality is weak or non-existent, democracy has failed to take root. For without national loyalty, opposition is a threat to government, and political disagreements create no common ground.

Attitudes to death go hand in hand with attitudes to sex. And it is in the sphere of sex that some of the greatest of medical confusions have arisen. I refer in particular to the "sex change" – again, an operation which has exhilarated the public, with its implication that sexuality is an elaborate accident, which can be tailored to the individual need. A person's sexuality is no longer regarded as part of his essence. It has become an attribute, which he might change as he changes his clothes. The possibility of thinking in such a way shows a deep change in perception. The obligation to accept one's sex has dwindled, in the same way as the obligation to accept one's death. Consequently people call upon doctors to help them, demanding painful, expensive and dangerous operations, whose moral effects cannot really be envisaged in advance, and whose premise is a kind of delusion which, however it might arouse our compassion, ought not to inspire our connivance. No doubt the time is not far distant when sex-change operations will be obtainable on the National Health, granted on the advice of "experts" able to discern the "real" gender identify of the soul sheathed within each human envelope.

Kant's position is extremely subtle — so subtle, indeed, that no commentator seems to agree with any other as to what it is.

Europe owes its greatness to the fact that the primary loyalties of the European people have been detached from religion and re-attached to the land. Those who believe that the division of Europe into nations has been the primary cause of European wars should remember the devastating wars of religion that national loyalties finally brought to an end. And they should study our art and literature for its inner meaning. In almost every case, they will discover, it is an art and literature not of war but of peace, an invocation of home and the routines of home, of gentleness, everydayness and enduring settlement.

The first effect of modernism was to make high culture difficult: to surround beauty with a wall of erudition.

Schopenhauer was not the only one of Hegel’s opponents to rest his faith in the unsayable. Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), in his attack on the prevailing Hegelian rationalism, sought to undermine the claim that ‘the real is the rational and the rational the real’, and so to reaffirm the value of that which, while real, lies beyond the reach of reason. But, lacking Schopenhauer’s gift of argument, and being indeed more literary than philosophical in his inclination, he did not set up any elaborate system of ideas whereby to postpone the recognition of his ultimate refuge. His principal interest was the vindication of the Christian faith, and he wrote directly or indirectly towards this end, inventing in the process the name, if not the philosophy of ‘existentialism’, for which achievement he is now chiefly known. His philosophy is a clear example of a reaction against idealism which is not also a form either of empiricism or skepticism. In the course of this reaction, it is once again the subject that is reaffirmed, as the ground of all philosophical thought.

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.

A free society is a community of free beings, bound by the laws of sympathy and by the obligations of family love. It is not a society of people released from all moral constraint–for that is precisely the opposite of a society. Without moral constraint there can be no cooperation, no family commitment, no long-term prospects, no hope of economic, let alone social, order.

There is no doubt in my mind that, from the third-person point of view, monarchy is the most reasonable form of government. By embodying the state in a fragile human person, it captures the arbitrariness and the givenness of political allegiance, and so transforms allegiance into affection.

Take any aspect of the Western inheritance of which our ancestors were proud, and you will find university courses devoted to deconstructing it. Take any positive feature of our political and cultural inheritance, and you will find concerted efforts in both the media and the academy to place it in quotation marks, and make it look like an imposture or a deceit. (p. 40)

In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.

A developed legal system, with elaborate common law rights, and supported by a system of natural justice, was the most precious legacy of our empire. If it were still permissible to defend colonization, I should justify it in terms of this bequest, and at the same time contrast the colonization of Africa with the Soviet "colonization" of eastern Europe, which has advanced not by the generation but by the destruction of law.

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.

I've never been an optimist but that's fine because pessimists have the possibility of being agreeably surprised, and that's a reason for being pessimistic, but I've always defended a certain kind of pessimism because what is known as optimism is really a collection of illusions and I think one must recognise what all religious people know, which is that human beings are imperfect and fallen and there's no way in which they can alone surmount the problems which they themselves create.

The modern world gives proof at every point that it is far easier to destroy institutions than to create them. Nevertheless, few people seem to understand this truth.