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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.

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
Look
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Offended
Matter
Differences
Threatening
Looks
Read
Judge
Even
Culture
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Good
Often
Judging
Think
Another
Democratic
Thinking
Persons
Taste
Suggestion
People
Person
Listen
Suggestions

More quotes by Roger Scruton

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The ethical life... is maintained in being by a common culture, which also upholds the togetherness of society... Unlike the modern youth culture, a common culture sanctifies the adult state, to which it offers rites of passage.
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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
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
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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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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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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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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.
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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When many people individually get what they want, the result may be something they collectively dislike.
Roger Scruton
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In 1970s Britain, conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half-mad recluses.
Roger Scruton
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The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation.
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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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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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
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Music addresses us from beyond the borders of the natural world
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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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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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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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.
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.
Roger Scruton