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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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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
Human
Embrace
Inheritance
Humans
Consciousness
Achievements
Right
Example
Submit
Must
Full
Rare
Critically
Always
Voice
Destroy
Patiently
Living
Conservative
Precarious
Given
Achievement
Modernity
Order
Response
Orderly

More quotes by Roger Scruton

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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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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.
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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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The best evidence of a mind is when you change it
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When many people individually get what they want, the result may be something they collectively dislike.
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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.
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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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Science proposes something and then does everything it can to disprove it. Religion is not like that. It proposes something and does everything it can to keep it from being disproved.
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Conservatives resonate to Burke's view of society, as a partnership between the living, the unborn and the dead.
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In 1970s Britain, conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half-mad recluses.
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When gifts are replaced by rights, so is gratitude replaced by claims. And claims breed resentment
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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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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.
Roger Scruton
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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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In our democratic culture people often think it is threatening to judge another person's taste. Some are even offended by the suggestion that there is a difference between good and bad taste, or that it matters what you look at or read or listen to.
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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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Classical buildings endure because they are loved, admired and accepted, and enjoy an innate adaption to human needs and purposes.
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In the attacks on the old ways of doing things on word in particular came into currency. That word was kitsch. Once introduced, the word stuck. Whatever you do, it musn't be kitsch. This became the first precept of the modernist artist in every medium.
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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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A philosophy that begins in doubt assails what no-one believes, and invites us to nothing believable
Roger Scruton