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.

Roger Scruton

Without Wit Who

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

Patience Men Christmas

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.

Roger Scruton

Voted Vote Use

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.

Roger Scruton

Wishes Wish Wanting

Although homosexuality has been normalised, it is not normal.

Roger Scruton

Though Thou T

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.

Roger Scruton

Men Love Home

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.

Roger Scruton

Wit Wing Win

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.

Roger Scruton

Men Wit Wing

Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude.

Roger Scruton

Life Death You

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

Roger Scruton

Well View Thinker

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.

Roger Scruton

You Words Word

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.

Roger Scruton

Yin Use Us

To live with someone who likes you, and whose judgement you respect, because you love them, does make quite a difference, I find.

Roger Scruton

Respect Men Love

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.

Roger Scruton

Alone World Which

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.

Roger Scruton

You Where Very

I love Viennese waltzes and polkas, and especially ceilidhs and old-fashioned formation dancing.

Roger Scruton

Love Waltz Walt

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.

Roger Scruton

Power Courage Age

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

Roger Scruton

Change Age Voters

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

Roger Scruton

Diet Art Would

We live in an extremely anxious age in which the core of our beliefs has been undermined to a great extent by scientific thinking.

Roger Scruton

Great Age Which

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?

Roger Scruton

Why Us T

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

Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton

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?

Roger Scruton

The conservative is the one who understands his own society from within and loves and defends it.

Roger Scruton

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

Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton

I've never been an optimist, but that's fine because pessimists have the possibility of being agreeably surprised.

Roger Scruton

In mathematics and science we solve our problems as well as create them. But in art and philosophy things are not so simple.

Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton

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

Roger Scruton

When a woman cries date rape what she means is the whole thing went too quickly.

Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton

Delia Smith is, actually, my bete noire. I consider her a most pernicious influence.

Roger Scruton

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

Roger Scruton

I'm a hate figure for a certain kind of half-educated politically correct person.

Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton

If there's a local reeling party, I might go to that.

Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton

Fashion makes me laugh.

Roger Scruton

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

Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton