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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
Liberal
Abstract
Intellect
Freedom
Amplified
Nothing
Childish
Really
Unreal
Disobedience
Anarchy

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The best evidence of a mind is when you change it
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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.
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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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Music addresses us from beyond the borders of the natural world
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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 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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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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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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A philosopher who says, 'There are no truths, only interpretations,' risks the retort: 'Is that true, or only an interpretation?'
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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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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.
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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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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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Classical buildings endure because they are loved, admired and accepted, and enjoy an innate adaption to human needs and purposes.
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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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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.
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In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.
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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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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