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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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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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Something of the child's pure delight in creation survives in every true work of art.
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Affect not to despise beauty: no one is freed from its dominion But regard it not a pearl of price--it is fleeting as the bow in the clouds.
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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.
Roger Scruton
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Were we to aim in every case at the kind of supreme beauty exemplified by Sta Maria della Salute, we should end with aesthetic overload. The clamorous masterpieces, jostling for attention side by side, would lose their distinctiveness, and the beauty of each of them would be at war with the beauty of the rest.
Roger Scruton
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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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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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Art and music shine a light of meaning on ordinary life, and through them we are able to confront the things that trouble us and to find consolation and peace in their presence.
Roger Scruton
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The best evidence of a mind is when you change it
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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.
Roger Scruton
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The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy.
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.
Roger Scruton
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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.
Roger Scruton
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When many people individually get what they want, the result may be something they collectively dislike.
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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Music addresses us from beyond the borders of the natural world
Roger Scruton
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A philosopher who says, 'There are no truths, only interpretations,' risks the retort: 'Is that true, or only an interpretation?'
Roger Scruton
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Modernism in architecture went hand in hand with socialist and fascist projects to rid old Europe of its hierarchical past
Roger Scruton
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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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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.
Roger Scruton