“ 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. Roger Scruton
“ If you ask a conservative for a statement of his political convictions, he may well say that he has none, and that the greatest heresy of modernity is precisely to see politics as a matter of convicti… Roger Scruton
“ Contact with secular and Christian ways of thinking increased Spinoza’s dissatisfaction with the biblical interpretations he received from the rabbis, who in turn frowned on his interest in natural sc… Roger Scruton
“ 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 vit… Roger Scruton
“ From this state of bewildered scepticism the student may take a leap of faith. And the leap is never backwards into the old curriculum, the old canon, the old belief in objective standards and settled… Roger Scruton
“ Like the pleasure of friendship, the pleasure in beauty is curious: it aims to understand its object, and to value what it finds. Roger Scruton
“ The philosopher and the scientist emphasize different features of the world, follow different interests and inspire different passions in the soul. But the aim of their study is in each case the same:… Roger Scruton
“ We must inevitably conclude, therefore, that the main influences over Spinoza’s thought during his formative years were not those philosophers, such as Descartes, to whom he later devoted his attentio… Roger Scruton
“ The picture of a universe of infinitely many wholly unrelated substances is at least as hard to understand as the monism of Spinoza, and far less easy to reconcile with appearances. Roger Scruton
“ Sanctions make a substantial contribution to power based on privation, and they have never hurt a single despot in the whole history of their use. Roger Scruton
“ Religious quarrels,’ he added, ‘do not arise so much from ardent zeal for religion, as from men’s various dispositions and love of contradiction, which causes them habitually to distort and condemn ev… Roger Scruton
“ While exorting us to judge other cultures in their own terms, he [Said] asks us to judge Western culture from a point of view outside---to set it against alternatives, and to judge it adversely, as et… Roger Scruton
“ But what you do with another person's beauty? The satisfied lover is as little able to possess the beauty of his beloved as the one who hopelessly observes it from afar. Roger Scruton
“ While Spinoza did not condemn marriage, he rejected it for himself, perhaps fearing the ‘ill temper of a woman’, and in any case recognizing in matrimony a threat to his scholarly interests. Roger Scruton
“ In American popular usage today, 'liberalism' means left-liberalism – not to be confused with 'neoliberalism' ... and is expressly contrasted with 'conservatism'. In this usage a liberal is one who le… Roger Scruton
“ As soon as another person becomes important to us, so that we feel in our lives the gravitational pull of his existence, we are to a certain extent astonished by his individuality. From time to time w… Roger Scruton
“ In the event things got worse, and Spinoza gave up the idea of publishing the Ethics, believing that it would create such a cloud of hostility as to obscure, in the minds even of reasonable people, th… Roger Scruton
“ Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created. This is especially true of the good things t… Roger Scruton
“ While we are familiar with the adverse effect of drink on an empty stomach, we are now witnessing the far worse effect of drink on an empty mind. Roger Scruton
“ The first axiom of Marx Scientist is that everything they tell you is a lie. The second axiom is that it doesn’t matter, since you are lying too. The third axiom is ‘Kill all liars! Roger Scruton
