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If you consider only utility, the things you build will soon be useless... nobody wants to be in it.

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
Build
Nobody
Wants
Things
Utility
Useless
Architecture
Consider
Soon

More quotes by Roger Scruton

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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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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.
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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Modernist buildings exclude dialogue, and the void that they create around themselves is not a public space but a desertification
Roger Scruton
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Music addresses us from beyond the borders of the natural world
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
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Private property is one of the best institutions which has ever evolved, to protect us from the bullying of others.
Roger Scruton
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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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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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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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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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Art has the ability to redeem life by finding beauty even in the worst aspect of things.
Roger Scruton
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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.
Roger Scruton
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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.
Roger Scruton
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The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation.
Roger Scruton
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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.
Roger Scruton
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A philosophy that begins in doubt assails what no-one believes, and invites us to nothing believable
Roger Scruton
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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.
Roger Scruton
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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.
Roger Scruton
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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