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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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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
Matter
Hand
Right
Situation
Make
Knowing
Possible
Appropriate
Purpose
Rely
Success
Shot
Hands
Whenever
Best
Shots

More quotes by 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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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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The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation.
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.
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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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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When gifts are replaced by rights, so is gratitude replaced by claims. And claims breed resentment
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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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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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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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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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
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Classical buildings endure because they are loved, admired and accepted, and enjoy an innate adaption to human needs and purposes.
Roger Scruton
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Styles may change, details may come and go, but the broad demands of aesthetic judgement are permanent.
Roger Scruton
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There is a deep human need for beauty and if you ignore that need in architecture your buildings will not last
Roger Scruton
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Conservatives resonate to Burke's view of society, as a partnership between the living, the unborn and the dead.
Roger Scruton
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Modernism in architecture went hand in hand with socialist and fascist projects to rid old Europe of its hierarchical past
Roger Scruton
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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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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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There are no chords in modernist architecture, only lines - lines that may come to an end, but that achieve no closure
Roger Scruton