Roger Scruton

“I am a conservative thinker, well known as such, outspoken as such but reasonable in my view.”

“One of the questions that has most bothered me in my reflections on culture is the question of kitsch. Just what is it? When did it begin? And why?”

“There is a chapter in 'Gentle Regrets' called 'Coming Home' which is really me expressing my later admiration for my father's public spirit.”

“The heretic is the one who speaks against the community from a place within its territory. He is the enemy within. The heathen, by contrast, is safely behind the walls, excluded by his own invincible arrogance.”

“Environmental degradation has one cause above all others: the propensity of human beings to take the benefit and leave the costs to someone else, preferably someone far away in space or time, whose protests can be safely ignored.”

“Like every other viable environmental policy, the search for clean energy begins at home.”

“For two centuries the English countryside has been an icon of national identity and the loved reminder of our island home. Yet the government is bent on littering the hills with wind turbines and the valleys with high speed railways.”

“My main argument is that environmental destruction comes when people externalise their costs and pass them on to future generations. That is obviously something that large enterprises do and they become large by doing it.”

“The sanctity of private property is so fundamental a part of the American settlement that the country's conservatives look with suspicion on any policy that seems to prevent people from doing what they will with what is theirs.”

“Life at home wasn't very good and I had really left by the time I was 16 and didn't go back until after Cambridge when I went to look after my mother when she was dying.”

“Anyone can lie. One need only have the requisite intention - in other words, to say something with the intention to deceive. Faking, by contrast, is an achievement. To fake things you have to take people in, yourself included.”

“I know ideals aren't realities, but they do influence reality - social, legal, political, cultural.”

“I am hostile to the idea that collective solutions have to be made by committees and then imposed top-down. I very much prefer bottom-up solutions.”

“In the traditional dances, physical contact was permitted in a way that it wasn't in everyday life. The electricity of physical contact has gone therefore from young people's lives.”

“What the word conservative means is not putting things back but conserving them. There are things that are threatened and you love them, so you want to keep them.”

“The great benefit of philosophy, which is also its great weakness, is that all its steps are taken in the spirit of doubt.”

“My 2018 ended with a hate storm, in response to my appointment as chair of the government's Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission.”

“Fashion makes me laugh.”

“Conservative voters tend to believe that the 'climate change' agenda has been foisted upon us by an unaccountable lobby of politicised intellectuals.”

“Ultimately, political order does not generate itself.”