Roger Scruton People Quotations

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.

To speak of beauty is to enter another and more exalted realm-a realm sufficiently apart from our everyday concerns as to be mentioned only with a certain hesitation. People who are always in praise and pursuit of the beautiful are an embarrassment, like people who make a constant display of their religious faith. Somehow, we feel such things should be kept for our exalted moments, and not paraded in company, or allowed to spill out over dinner.

When many people individually get what they want, the result may be something they collectively dislike.

Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference: beauty demands to be noticed; it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend. If there are people who are indifferent to beauty, then it is surely because they do not perceive it.

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.

State solutions are imposed from above; they are often without corrective devices, and cannot easily be reversed on the proof of failure. Their inflexibility goes hand in hand with their planned and goal-directed nature, and when they fail the efforts of the state are directed not to changing them but to changing people’s belief that they have failed.

Our gardens are symbols of home rather than seduction. Young people with fire in their blood are seldom found in them. The garden is the scene of middle age, of the slow passage from sexual excitement to domestic routine.

It is not enough to be nice; you have to be good. We are attracted by nice people; but only on the assumption that their niceness is a sign of goodness.