Roger Scruton Quotes

"Real freedom, concrete freedom, the freedom that can actually be defined, claimed, and granted, was not the opposite of obedience but its other side. The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy"

"I would suggest that gobbledygook is far more effective in propagating left-wing and progressive opinions than reasoned argument, for the simple reason that progressive opinions, once explicitly stated, expose themselves to the threat of refutation, something that they do not…

Beautifully said. At age 73 I feel this for my grandchildren.

Why do British elites so hate their own homeland and love anything foreign? Sir Roger Scruton called it oikophobia and xenophilia. After the Chagos and EU fishing debacles, Dr Nicholas Tate brings the picture up to date. dailysceptic.org/2025/07/22/hat…

"We do not merely study the past, we inherit it, and inheritance brings with it not only the rights of ownership, but the duties of trusteeship. Things fought for and died for should not be idly squandered. For they are the property of others, who are not yet born"

👇 From the acknowledgements in Conservative Critique of Liberal Obligations. Kindle version available for free.

"The mass immigration of communities who define their political membership in religious rather than secular terms; the transfer of sovereignty from parliament to unelected officials in foreign countries and foreign courts of law; the disruption of the common law by the abolition…

"The error of reducing political order to the operations of the market parallels the error of revolutionary socialism, in reducing politics to a plan. In his Reflections on the French Revolution, Burke argued against the geometrical politics, as he called it, of the French…

Roger Scruton (1944-2020) was one of the most brilliant and incisive defenders of what he described as “high culture”, the West's great repository of art, literature, and philosophy that functions to bind people together into an ethical community. Here’s why it matters… 🧵

Roger Scruton on national sovereignty:

A review of my book on Roger Scruton in First Things.

I managed to squeeze in - Edmund Burke, G. K. Chesterton, Adam Smith, David Hume, and Roger Scruton into my new @ConHome article. conservativehome.com/2024/02/28/dan…

This is a excellent short review of @HorcherF's book on Roger Scruton by a former student of Roger's @paulshakeshafte via @firstthingsmag.

People love me really :-)

"The ruling postmodernist idea is that Western culture is a burden from which we have now been released. And the release is total. All constraints on the mind, including the discredited rules of truth, objectivity, and meaning, have withered away. With the collapse of the old…

Thanks to @firstthingsmag for publishing my review of @HorcherF's latest book on Roger Scruton (which you should read) Link below

"Modernist narratives had pointed fowards to a future state, unlike the backward-looking narratives (the myths and the religions) which legitimize traditional societies. And the future state – the Idea to be realized (freedom, enlightenment, socialism, prosperity, progress) –…