Roger Scruton
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.Collection: Patience
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.Collection: Independence
Wonder and awe are the diet of the artist and without them the world would be far less meaningful to us than it is.Collection: Diet
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.Collection: Environmental
To live with someone who likes you, and whose judgement you respect, because you love them, does make quite a difference, I find.Collection: Respect
Like every other viable environmental policy, the search for clean energy begins at home.Collection: Environmental
Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude.Collection: Death
For many artists and critics, beauty is a discredited idea. It denotes the saccharine sylvan scenes and cheesy melodies that appealed to Granny.Collection: Beauty
The traditional family has an intrinsic as well as an instrumental value, and that is the real reason so many conservatives defend it.Collection: Family
For Conservatives, all disputes over law, liberty and justice are addressed to a historic and existing community. The root of politics, they believe, is attachment - the motive in human beings that binds them to the place, the customs, the history and the people who are theirs.Collection: History
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.Collection: Environmental
No, I don't think I've ever really favoured English independence. My view is that if the Scots want to be independent then we should aim for the same thing.Collection: Independence
When I say there is no such crime as date rape I am saying what is true. There isn't a specific legal category of date rape and I wanted to make that point in order to ensure that people don't use this to obscure the difference between real sexual violence and, you know, things that have gone wrong.Collection: Legal
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.Collection: Society
Abstract ideas like equality and liberty have a spurious transparency, and can be used to derive pleasing theorems in the manner of Jean-Jacques Rousseau or John Rawls.Collection: Equality
When a woman cries date rape what she means is the whole thing went too quickly.
Conservatism, for me, is the philosophy and the politics of attachment.
The rude, raw, 'let it all hang out' freedom of the Californian hippies was in fact the most censorious and oppressive of societies that I have encountered.
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.
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.
Each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one and that is a very frightening thing.
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.
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?
My father was a man of principle who found his principles confirmed in the unremitting failure which they brought on him.
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?
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.
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.
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.
The conservative is the one who understands his own society from within and loves and defends it.
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.
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.
The Marxist theory of ideology is extremely contentious, not least because it is tied to socio-economic hypotheses that are no longer believable.
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.
Perhaps the world of art is just one vast pretence, in which we all take part since, after all, there is no real cost to it, except to those like Charles Saatchi, rich enough to splash out on junk?
I'm a hate figure for a certain kind of half-educated politically correct person.
Conservatism is about freedom, yes. But it is also about the institutions and attitudes that shape the responsible citizen, and ensure that freedom is a benefit to us all. Conservatism is therefore also about the limits to freedom.
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.
Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.
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.
The great benefit of philosophy, which is also its great weakness, is that all its steps are taken in the spirit of doubt.
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.
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 lot of the Qur'an is, frankly, cantankerous, vitriolic, man-hating stuff.
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.
It is scarcely a mark of intellectual profundity to have noticed that our society is big.
My life divides into three parts. In the first I was wretched; in the second ill at ease; in the third hunting.
Conservatives reveal themselves through their care for ordinary human things, and their recognition of the fragility of decency and the need to protect it.
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.
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.
I've never been an optimist, but that's fine because pessimists have the possibility of being agreeably surprised.