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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.

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
Also
Exist
States
Joy
Anything
Willing
Reason
Suffering
Renunciation
Like
Purpose
Brotherhood
People
Peace
Involves
Desire
Mutual
Else
Diversity

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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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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Styles may change, details may come and go, but the broad demands of aesthetic judgement are permanent.
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A philosopher who says, 'There are no truths, only interpretations,' risks the retort: 'Is that true, or only an interpretation?'
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When gifts are replaced by rights, so is gratitude replaced by claims. And claims breed resentment
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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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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.
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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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There are no chords in modernist architecture, only lines - lines that may come to an end, but that achieve no closure
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The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation.
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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.
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Private property is one of the best institutions which has ever evolved, to protect us from the bullying of others.
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There is a deep human need for beauty and if you ignore that need in architecture your buildings will not last
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Through the pursuit of beauty we shape the world as a home, and in doing so we both amplify our joys and find consolation for our sorrows.
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Freedom can reside only in a point of view, a way of looking upon the system of necessity.Surely this is the one freedom that we may attain to: not to be released from physical reality, but to understand reality and ourselves as part of it, and so be reconciled to what we are.
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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 a spiritual desert.
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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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When many people individually get what they want, the result may be something they collectively dislike.
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Wine is not just an object of pleasure, but an object of knowledge and the pleasure depends on the knowledge.
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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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