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

More quotes by Roger Scruton

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Music addresses us from beyond the borders of the natural world
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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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Wine is not just an object of pleasure, but an object of knowledge and the pleasure depends on the knowledge.
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A philosophy that begins in doubt assails what no-one believes, and invites us to nothing believable
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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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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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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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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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Modernism in architecture went hand in hand with socialist and fascist projects to rid old Europe of its hierarchical past
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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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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.
Roger Scruton
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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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Modernist buildings exclude dialogue, and the void that they create around themselves is not a public space but a desertification
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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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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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In 1970s Britain, conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half-mad recluses.
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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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The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy.
Roger Scruton
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In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.
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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.
Roger Scruton