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A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.

Roger Scruton

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Roger Scruton
Age: 75 †
Born: 1944
Born: February 27
Died: 2020
Died: January 12
Aesthetician
Composer
Journalist
Novelist
Philosopher
Political Scientist
Politician
University Teacher
Writer
Roger Vernon Scruton
Professor Sir Roger Vernon Scruton
Writer
Says
Truth
Believe
Relative
Truths
Merely
Asking

More quotes by Roger Scruton

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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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In 1970s Britain, conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half-mad recluses.
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The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy.
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The art establishment has turned away from the old curriculum which puts beauty and craft at the top of the agenda.
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Styles may change, details may come and go, but the broad demands of aesthetic judgement are permanent.
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There are no chords in modernist architecture, only lines - lines that may come to an end, but that achieve no closure
Roger Scruton
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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 like peace between people. It involves the willing renunciation of purpose, in the mutual desire not to do, but to be.
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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.
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To teach virtue we must educate the emotions, and this means learning what to feel in the various circumstances that prompt them.
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In the absence of organized religion, the only vehicle for redemption is art - not just the fragmentary arts of painting or music or poetry, but the kind of art that creates a whole world in itself and in that world we see ourselves reflected and see our religious life perfected.
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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.
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Architecture, like dress, is an exercise in good manners, and good manners involve the habit of skillful insincerity - the habit of saying good morning to those whose mornings you would rather blight, and of passing the butter to those you would rather starve.
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Kant's position is extremely subtle - so subtle, indeed, that no commentator seems to agree with any other as to what it is.
Roger Scruton
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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.
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When gifts are replaced by rights, so is gratitude replaced by claims. And claims breed resentment
Roger Scruton
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If you consider only utility, the things you build will soon be useless... nobody wants to be in it.
Roger Scruton
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When many people individually get what they want, the result may be something they collectively dislike.
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Something of the child's pure delight in creation survives in every true work of art.
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The problems of philosophy and the systems designed to solve them are formulated in terms which tend to refer, not to the realm of actuality, but to the realms of possibility and necessity: to what might be and what must be, rather than to what is.
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Modernist buildings exclude dialogue, and the void that they create around themselves is not a public space but a desertification
Roger Scruton