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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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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
Really
Unreal
Disobedience
Anarchy
Liberal
Abstract
Intellect
Freedom
Amplified
Nothing
Childish

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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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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 consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation.
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In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.
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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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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.
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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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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 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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Styles may change, details may come and go, but the broad demands of aesthetic judgement are permanent.
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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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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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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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Modernist buildings exclude dialogue, and the void that they create around themselves is not a public space but a desertification
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