Frasi di Roger Scruton

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“Uno scrittore che afferma che non ci sono verità o che tutta la verità è semplicemente relativa ti sta chiedendo di non credergli. Quindi non farlo.”

“Non è abbastanza per essere simpatici; devi essere buono. Siamo attratti da persone simpatiche; ma solo supponendo che la loro gentilezza sia un segno di bontà.”

“[Burke] ha sottolineato che le nuove forme di politica, che sperano di organizzare la società attorno alla ricerca razionale della libertà, dell'uguaglianza, della fraternità o dei loro equivalenti modernisti, sono in realtà forme di irrazionalità militante.”

“Un socialismo internazionale è l'ideale dichiarato della maggior parte dei socialisti; un liberalismo internazionale è la tendenza non dichiarata del liberale. Per nessuno dei due sistemi è pensabile che gli uomini vivano, non per aspirazioni universali ma per attaccamenti locali; non da una "solidarietà" che si estende in tutto il mondo da un capo all'altro, ma da obblighi che sono compresi in termini che separano gli uomini dalla maggior parte dei loro simili, in termini di storia nazionale, religione, lingua e costumi che forniscono base di legittimità.”

“Europe owes its greatness to the fact that the primary loyalties of the European people have been detached from religion and re-attached to the land. Those who believe that the division of Europe into nations has been the primary cause of European wars should remember the devastating wars of religion that national loyalties finally brought to an end. And they should study our art and literature for its inner meaning. In almost every case, they will discover, it is an art and literature not of war but of peace, an invocation of home and the routines of home, of gentleness, everydayness and enduring settlement.”

“Democracies owe their existence to national loyalties — the loyalties that are supposedly shared by government and opposition, by all political parties, and by the electorate as a whole. Wherever the experience of nationality is weak or non-existent, democracy has failed to take root. For without national loyalty, opposition is a threat to government, and political disagreements create no common ground.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Conservatives believe that our identities and values are formed through our relations with other people, and not through our relation with the state. The state is not an end but a means. Civil society is the end, and the state is the means to protect it. The social world emerges through free association, rooted in friendship and community life. And the customs and institutions that we cherish have grown from below, by the ‘invisible hand’ of co-operation. They have rarely been imposed from above by the work of politics, the role of which, for a conservative, is to reconcile our many aims, and not to dictate or control them.”

“The modern world gives proof at every point that it is far easier to destroy institutions than to create them. Nevertheless, few people seem to understand this truth.”

“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.”

“In 1970s Britain, conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half-mad recluses.”

“Hayek fails to account either for the passion among intellectuals for equality, or for the resulting success of socialists and their egalitarian successors in driving the liberal idea from the stage of politics. This passion for equality is not a new thing, and indeed pre-dates socialism by many centuries, finding its most influential expression in the writings of Rousseau. There is no consensus as to how equality might be achieved, what it would consist in if achieved, or why it is so desirable in the first place. But no argument against the cogency or viability of the idea has the faintest chance of being listened to or discussed by those who have fallen under its spell.”

“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.”

“An international socialism is the stated ideal of most socialists; an international liberalism is the unstated tendency of the liberal. To neither system is it thinkable that men live, not by universal aspirations but by local attachments; not by a “solidarity” that stretches across the globe from end to end, but by obligations that are understood in terms which separate men from most of their fellows—in terms such as national history, religion, language, and the customs that provide the basis of legitimacy.”

“When truth cannot make itself known in words, it will make itself known in deeds.”

“In discussing tradition, we are not discussing arbitrary rules and conventions. We are discussing answers that have been discovered to enduring questions.”

“There is no doubt in my mind that, from the third-person point of view, monarchy is the most reasonable form of government. By embodying the state in a fragile human person, it captures the arbitrariness and the givenness of political allegiance, and so transforms allegiance into affection.”