Roger Scruton citations (46 citations, Page 2)

Roger Scruton: 46 citations0 J'aime

Roger Scruton Citations

“La déconstruction se déconstruit et disparaît par elle-même, ne laissant qu’un sourire désincarné et une légère odeur de soufre.”

Roger Scruton

Deconstruction deconstructs itself, and disappears up its own behind, leaving only a disembodied smile and a faint smell of sulphur.
en
Publications, Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey, 1994

Roger Scruton: Citations en anglais

“Without the background of a remembered faith modernism loses its conviction: it becomes routinised. For a long time now it has been assumed that there can be no authentic creation in the sphere of high art which is not is some way a 'challenge' to the ordinary public. Art must give offence, stepping out of the future fully armed against the bourgeois taste for kitsch and cliché. But the result of this is that offence becomes a cliché.”

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Roger Scruton

"Avant-garde and Kitsch" (p. 86)
Modern Culture (2000)

“Why is it after a century of socialist disasters, and an intellectual legacy that has been time and again exploded, the left-wing position remains, as it were, the default position to which thinking people gravitate when called upon for a comprehensive philosophy? Why are “right-wingers” marginalised in the educational system, denounced in the media and regarded by our political class as untouchable, fit only to clean up after the orgies of luxurious nonsense indulged in by their moral superiors?”

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Roger Scruton

Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (2015)

“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.”

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Roger Scruton

England and the Need for Nations (2006)

“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.”

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Roger Scruton

England and the Need for Nations (2006)

“This "knowing what to do"… is a matter of having the right purpose, the purpose appropriate to the situation in hand… The one who "knows what to do" is the one on whom you can rely to make the best shot at success, whenever success is possible.”

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Roger Scruton

"Knowledge and Feeling" (p. 35)
Culture Counts (2007)

“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.”

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Roger Scruton

"Idle Hands" (p. 127)
Modern Culture (2000)

“Conservatives believe that our identities and values are formed through our relations with other people, and not through our relation with the state. The state is not an end but a means. Civil society is the end, and the state is the means to protect it. The social world emerges through free association, rooted in friendship and community life. And the customs and institutions that we cherish have grown from below, by the ‘invisible hand’ of co-operation. They have rarely been imposed from above by the work of politics, the role of which, for a conservative, is to reconcile our many aims, and not to dictate or control them.”

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Roger Scruton

"Stand up for the real meaning of freedom," http://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/01/the-right-way/ The Spectator (January 2014).

“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.”

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Roger Scruton

"Rousseau & the origins of liberalism," https://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/rousseau-the-origins-of-liberalism-2988 The New Criterion (October 1998).

“In all the areas of life where people have sought and found consolation through forbidding their desires—sex in particular, and taste in general—the habit of judgment is now to be stamped out.”

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Roger Scruton

"Rays of Hope" (p. 106)
Culture Counts (2007)

“In 1970s Britain, conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half-mad recluses.”

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Roger Scruton

"Why I became a conservative," http://newcriterion.com:81/archive/21/feb03/burke.htm The New Criterion (February 2003).

“Hayek fails to account either for the passion among intellectuals for equality, or for the resulting success of socialists and their egalitarian successors in driving the liberal idea from the stage of politics. This passion for equality is not a new thing, and indeed pre-dates socialism by many centuries, finding its most influential expression in the writings of Rousseau. There is no consensus as to how equality might be achieved, what it would consist in if achieved, or why it is so desirable in the first place. But no argument against the cogency or viability of the idea has the faintest chance of being listened to or discussed by those who have fallen under its spell.”

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Roger Scruton

"Hayek and conservatism", in Edward Feser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hayek (2006)