Whether it is a garden gnome, the sound of Bing Crosby launching into 'White Christmas', the blinking innocent eyes of Bambi or the words of Patience Strong, the kitsch phenomenon is there as strong and recognisable as your mother's face. You seldom if ever have the question, whether this is kitsch or not. If you think it might be, then it is.
Roger Scruton
Given the right to - given the opportunity to vote, I voted for Brexit because I've never approved really of the European Union, I never approved of it because of its attempts to confiscate national sovereignty in all the issues that matter.
A reactionary is fixed on the past and wanting to return to it; a conservative wishes to adapt what is best in the past to the changing circumstances of the present.
Although homosexuality has been normalised, it is not normal.
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.
Leftwing people find it very hard to get on with rightwing people, because they believe that they are evil. Whereas I have no problem getting on with leftwing people, because I simply believe that they are mistaken.
My own view is that left-wing positions largely come about from resentment - I agree with Nietzsche about this - a resentment about the surrounding social order. They have privileges, I don't. Or, I have them and I can't live up to them.
Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude.
I am a conservative thinker, well known as such, outspoken as such but reasonable in my view.
The robust English view used to be that the correct response to offensive words is to ignore them, or to answer them with a rebuke. If you invoke the law at all, it should be to protect the one who gives the offence, and not the one who takes it. Now, it seems, it is all the other way round.
But the European Union does not have a concept of national identity. It was set up to abolish that idea, not to abolish German national identity because that was trying to save itself.
To live with someone who likes you, and whose judgement you respect, because you love them, does make quite a difference, I find.
What makes us human is that we ask questions. All the animals have interests, instincts and conceptions. All the animals frame for themselves an idea of the world in which they live. But we alone question our surroundings.
America is the one place where you can talk of 'this nation' and everyone knows exactly what you think. People put a flag on their porch, and they do have a desire to localize everything and celebrate things locally.
I love Viennese waltzes and polkas, and especially ceilidhs and old-fashioned formation dancing.
Faking is a social activity in which people act together to draw a veil over unwanted realities and encourage each other in the exercise of their illusory powers.
Conservative voters tend to believe that the 'climate change' agenda has been foisted upon us by an unaccountable lobby of politicised intellectuals.
Wonder and awe are the diet of the artist and without them the world would be far less meaningful to us than it is.
We live in an extremely anxious age in which the core of our beliefs has been undermined to a great extent by scientific thinking.
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 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.
The main aim of conservative politicians is to get through to the next election without being noticed. Nothing is more embarrassing to them than a person who claims not only to share their beliefs but also to be inclined to put them into practice.
Of course, it is the case that conservatism as I envisage it distances itself always from abstract conceptions and tries to find the concrete reality.
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.
Under the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006, it is an offence to stir up hatred towards religious and racial groups. 'Stirring up hatred' is an expression both loaded and undefined. Do I stir up hatred towards a religious group by criticising its beliefs in outspoken terms?
The conservative is the one who understands his own society from within and loves and defends it.
To people like me, educated in post-war Britain, free speech has been a firm premise of the British way of life.
Politics is a matter of day-to-day improvisation, and it often seems as though the major parties are guided only by the desire to stay in office and not by any philosophy that might justify their doing so.
A high culture is the self-consciousness of a society. It contains the works of art, literature, scholarship and philosophy that establish a shared frame of reference among educated people.
The language of politics is spoken in the first-person plural, and for Conservatives, the duty of the politician is to maintain that first-person plural in being.
I've never been an optimist, but that's fine because pessimists have the possibility of being agreeably surprised.
In mathematics and science we solve our problems as well as create them. But in art and philosophy things are not so simple.
What makes a politician accountable is not that there are millions of people who vote, but that there are procedures of government that force him to account for himself.
Morality is like a field of flowers beneath which the corpses are piled in a thousand layers. It is an evolved mechanism whereby the human organism proceeds through life sustained on every side by bonds of mutual interest.
Like every other viable environmental policy, the search for clean energy begins at home.
When a woman cries date rape what she means is the whole thing went too quickly.
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.
Nothing upset me more than the award of Companion of Honour to Eric Hobsbawm in reward for a lifetime of unswerving loyalty to the Soviet Union.
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.
Delia Smith is, actually, my bete noire. I consider her a most pernicious influence.
It's right to flog a dead horse sometimes, when the previous flogging has not annihilated it.
I'm a hate figure for a certain kind of half-educated politically correct person.
The Scottish desire for independence is, to some extent, a fabrication. They want to identify themselves as Scots but still to be part of a, to enjoy the subsidy they get from being part of the kingdom.
If there's a local reeling party, I might go to that.
If you say something in advance - if you describe a problem as it arises, people always turn on you because they don't want to hear about it. But when it's too late to do anything, they will then turn around and say that you were right. That's human nature.
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.
Fashion makes me laugh.
I know ideals aren't realities, but they do influence reality - social, legal, political, cultural.
I think that, on the whole, risk-taking entrepreneurial characters regard nature as a sort of background that we can use for our own advantage.
