Roger Scruton

“If you're going to have a free economy, one in which the ordinary citizen can dispose of his own income, you're going to have people who dispose of it in an anti-social way.”

“Wonder and awe are the diet of the artist and without them the world would be far less meaningful to us than it is.”

“18th century opera is packed with emotion, but contains not a trace of kitsch. Only with the 'thees' and 'thous' of Victorian poetry does the disease begin to grow in our poetic tradition.”

“I do ask myself why I make people so enraged, because I only ever say what I think. And while I know it might not be everyone's point of view, that doesn't seem particularly intolerable to me.”

“Although homosexuality has been normalised, it is not normal.”

“In art it is always as though the question is what the work of art is really about.”

“Civilization is always threatened from below, by patterns of belief and emotion that may once have been useful to our ancestors, but that are useful no longer.”

“To people like me, educated in post-war Britain, free speech has been a firm premise of the British way of life.”

“Cameron's resignation really was the death knell of the Conservative Party as we knew it because that's something a proper Conservative politician cannot do: renounce leadership at the moment when it's needed.”

“One must recognise what all religious people know, which is that human beings are imperfect and fallen and there's no way in which they alone can surmount the problems which they create.”

“My father was a man of principle who found his principles confirmed in the unremitting failure which they brought on him.”

“I've always taken the view that works of art are not just things that we enjoy. They can convey truths about the world more vividly and to greater effect than ordinary philosophical prose can because they don't just deal in ideas but show the emotional reality of them.”

“I've spent my life arguing for greater respect between men and women and anyone who takes the time to read my books or listen to my lectures will realise this.”

“There has been throughout this country and throughout Europe really an attempt silence the conservative voice. We get identified, caricatured and then demonised and made to look as though we are some kind of sinister, fascist, racist kind of people.”

“Nonsense has taken up residence in the heart of public debate and also in the academy. This nonsense is part of the huge fund of unreason on which the plans and schemes of optimists draw for their vitality. Nonsense confiscates meaning. It thereby puts truth and falsehood, reason and unreason, light and darkness on an equal footing. It is a blow cast in defence of intellectual freedom, as the optimists construe it, namely the freedom to believe anything at all, provided you feel better for it.”

“All political order presupposes a pre-political order, a sense that people belong together. And then, of course, they might seek a contract that embodies their togetherness. But the togetherness has to be there.”

“If he had stayed in Slovenia, and Slovenia had stayed Communist, Zizek would not have been the nuisance he has since become. Indeed, if there were no greater reason to regret the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, the release of Zizek on to the world of Western scholarship would perhaps already be a sufficient one.”

“The world of art, I have suggested, is full of fakes. Fake originality, fake emotion and the fake expertise of the critics - these are all around us and in such abundance that we hardly know where to look for the real thing. Or perhaps there is no real thing?”

“We should make the case for the things we love, even if we think that people will misunderstand them. That is why people defend the U.S. Constitution, even though so few really understand the subtle thinking embodied in that document.”

“It's right to flog a dead horse sometimes, when the previous flogging has not annihilated it.”