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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.

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
Power
Substantial
Whole
Sanctions
Make
Contribution
Never
Based
Single
Hurt
Privation
Use
Despot
History
Despots

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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Modernist buildings exclude dialogue, and the void that they create around themselves is not a public space but a desertification
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Modernism in architecture went hand in hand with socialist and fascist projects to rid old Europe of its hierarchical past
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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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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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Art has the ability to redeem life by finding beauty even in the worst aspect of things.
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The sexual parts are not only vivid examples of the body's dominion they are also apertures whose damp emissions and ammoniac smells testify to the mysterious putrefaction of the body.
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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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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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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.
Roger Scruton
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In 1970s Britain, conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half-mad recluses.
Roger Scruton
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Styles may change, details may come and go, but the broad demands of aesthetic judgement are permanent.
Roger Scruton
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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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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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The best evidence of a mind is when you change it
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
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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In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.
Roger Scruton
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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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Wine is not just an object of pleasure, but an object of knowledge and the pleasure depends on the knowledge.
Roger Scruton