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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 5d7c342 | So let us replace the word with a true description. People in our societies own things, their labour included, and can trade those things freely with others. They can buy, sell, accumulate, save, share and give. They can enjoy all that their freely exercised labour can secure for them and even, if they choose, do nothing and still survive. You can take away the freedom to buy and sell; you can compel people to work on terms that they would .. | marxism | Roger Scruton | |
| edf18bf | a free economy is an economy run by free beings. And free beings are responsible beings. Economic transactions in a regime of private property depend not only on distinguishing mine from yours, but also on relating me to you. Without accountability, nobody is to be trusted, and without trust the virtues that are attributed to the free economy would not arise. Every | Roger Scruton | ||
| 27e3211 | Kant enjoyed the company of women (provided that they did not pretend to understand the Critique of Pure Reason) and | Roger Scruton | ||
| 29c0e88 | For Medieval craftsmen, work was an act of piety and was sanctified in their own eyes as in the eyes of their God. For such labourers, end and means are one and he spiritual wholeness of faith is translated into the visual wholeness and purify of their craft. hence their craft was also art, a permanent testimony to the reality on earth of humanity's spiritual redemption. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 7c8d954 | The market-based legal order of the Brussels bureaucracy helped to fill the legal vacuum created by communism, and was warmly received on that account. But, because of the unwise provisions of the Treaty of Rome regarding freedom of movement, it has led to the mass emigration of the professional classes, and to the loss of the educated young from countries that stand desperately in need of them. The 'enlargement' agenda has therefore become.. | Roger Scruton | ||
| fe366f2 | was calculated to kill off democracy. | Roger Scruton | ||
| b977f95 | Pokud jsem byl u toho (a jisteze jsem uplne u vseho nebyl), uplne prvni explicitni otazku, zda zamyslime zakazat KSC, vyslovil nahlas - priznacne - cizinec, britsky konzervativni filozof a publicista Roger Scruton, a to 6. ledna 1990 pri besede tehdy jiz prezidenta Vaclava Havla s brnenskymi studenty v Moravskem narodnim divadle. Havel a nekolik lidi z prazskeho a brnenskeho OF sedeli na podiu a Rogeruv hlas se behem diskuse ozval odnekud z.. | политика sametová-revoluce | Petr Pithart | |
| c907ee0 | Unlike the Medicare provisions, which were brought in by negotiation between the two principal parties, 'Obamacare' was the initiative of a single party, did not have the consent of the opposition and was concealed within 2,000 pages of legislative jargon that was never properly explained either to the public or to the members of Congress. Not surprisingly, therefore, the legislation has led to a polarization of opinion and a breakdown in t.. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 51027dd | John O'Sullivan has forcefully argued that the simultaneous presence in the highest offices of Reagan, Thatcher and Pope John Paul II was the cause of the Soviet collapse.3 And my own experience confirms this. | Roger Scruton | ||
| d5779bb | The goal, Karel said, was not to tell explicit lies but to destroy the distinction between the true and the false, so that lying becomes neither necessary nor possible. | Roger Scruton | ||
| ed42dba | And in answering that question he saw the inside of that bleak Viking world, the reality of love and compassion that all these hammer-throwing and skull-smashing gods concealed. That | Roger Scruton | ||
| 232f970 | The two goals of liberation and social justice are not obviously compatible, any more than were the liberty and equality advocated at the French Revolution. If liberation involves the liberation of individual potential, how do we stop the ambitious, the energetic, the intelligent, the good-looking and the strong from getting ahead, and what should we allow ourselves by way of constraining them? | politics | Roger Scruton | |
| 1b2d50c | One cure for the pain of desecration is the move towards total PROFANATION: in other words, to wipe out all vestiges of sanctity from the once worshipped object, to make it merely a thing OF the world, and not just a thing IN the world, something that is nothing over and above the substitutes that can at any time replace it. That is what we see in the spreading addiction to pornography - a profanation that removes the sexual bond entirely f.. | pornography profanation | Roger Scruton | |
| 10f1d92 | A consensual order is one in which the decisions on which our relations with others depend are, discounting emergencies, freely taken. Decisions are free when each of us settles his path through life by negotiation, playing his cards according to his own best judgement and without coercion from others. Traditional liberalism is the view that such a society is possible only if the individual members have sovereignty over their own lives - wh.. | Roger Scruton | ||
| d6ee50b | Once we distinguish race and culture, the way is open to acknowledge that not all cultures are equally admirable, and that not all cultures can exist comfortably side by side. To | Roger Scruton | ||
| f41c825 | The 'labour theory of value', implicit in Adam Smith and made explicit by David Ricardo, presented labour as the source of economic value, the prime mover of the market and the part of man's nature that is inherently priced. By harnessing labour we replace the old relation between nature and need with the new relation between man and his products. The translation of use into exchange, of nature into commodities, of personal relations into t.. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 900d705 | Music, Schopenhauer wrote, is not unconscious arithmetic, as Leibniz had claimed, but unconscious philosophy, since in music the inner essence of the world, which is will, is made directly present to the mind. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 0152dcc | Belief without any practice is of no use to us. But there are two sides to religious practice: one is the ritualistic, which is terribly important to the people engaged in it, and the other is moral, living your life in a better way. You can pray five times a day and still not lead the moral life. We in our communities put more emphasis on the moral life than on ritual. I don't want to say that in order to restore what we need we have to be.. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 640ecdb | 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. | ancestors belief below civilization emotion pattern patterns threaten threatened use useful | Roger Scruton | |
| 56a2452 | Whose freedom, how exercised, how circumscribed and how defined? | Roger Scruton | ||
| a875038 | I believed that 'freedom' is not a clear or sufficient answer to the question of what conservatives believe in. Like Matthew Arnold, I held that 'freedom is a very good horse to ride, but to ride somewhere'. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 2e85023 | Moreover, since it is in the nature of tastes to differ, how can a standard erected by one person's taste be used to cast judgement on another's? How, for example, can we pretend that one type of music is superior or inferior to another when comparative judgements merely reflect the taste of the one who makes them? | Roger Scruton | ||
| 0eaf098 | 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 science, and on his study of the pernicious Latin language, in which so much heresy and blasphemy had been so engagingly expressed. | latin natural-science spinoza | Roger Scruton | |
| 0212b76 | Some of the greatest achievements of modern philosophy result from the attempt to reconcile the belief in human freedom with the eternal laws of God's nature, and among these achievements Spinoza's is not only the most imaginative and profound, but perhaps the only one that is truly plausible. | spinoza | Roger Scruton | |
| ddbfa0b | I say it was immediately apparent, but it was not apparent to the intellectual class, which has remained largely wedded to the post-war consensus to this day. The | Roger Scruton | ||
| e241924 | Throughout his life Hayek wanted to affirm his identity with the classic liberal tradition, believing that the true cause of the crises leading to two world wars was the steady increase increase in the power of the state, and its misuse in the pursuit of unattainable goals. 'Social justice' was the name of one of these goals, and Hayek expressly dismissed the expression as a piece of deceptive Newspeak, used to advance large-scale injustice.. | social-justice social-justice-warriors | Roger Scruton | |
| 0320d7a | In the Judaeo-Christian tradition all this is well known, and incorporated into the sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church as well as the rituals and liturgy of Yom Kippur. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 214f5f6 | Toleration means being prepared to accept opinions that you intensely dislike. Likewise democracy means consenting to be governed by people whom you intensely dislike. This | Roger Scruton | ||
| cd80c08 | The personal eludes biology in just the way that the face in the picture eludes the theory of pigments. The personal is not an addition to the biological: it emerges from it, in something like the way the face emerges from the colored patches on a canvas. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 83a052f | Accountability in public office is but one manifestation of this cultural inheritance, and we should not be surprised that it is the first thing to disappear when the utopians and the planners take over. | Roger Scruton | ||
| bc04136 | It is to overlook the culture that has focused, down the centuries, on the business of repentance. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 09f7546 | Paul Benacerraf, 'What Numbers Could Not Be,' Philosophical Review (1965). | Roger Scruton | ||
| 542427e | Spinoza wrote the last indisputable Latin masterpiece, and one in which the refined conceptions of medieval philosophy are finally turned against themselves and destroyed entirely. He chose a single word from that language for his device: caute - 'be cautious' - inscribed beneath a rose, the symbol of secrecy. For, having chosen to write in a language that was so widely intelligible, he was compelled to hide what he had written. | spinoza | Roger Scruton | |
| 017d6b5 | The ascent of the soul through love, which Plato describes in the Phaedrus, is symbolized in the figure of Aphrodite Urania, and this was the Venus painted by Botticelli, who was incidentally an ardent Platonist, and member of the Platonist circle around Pico della Mirandola. Botticelli's Venus is not erotic: she is a vision of heavenly beauty, a visitation from other and higher spheres, and a call to transcendence. Indeed, she is self-evid.. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 4df9564 | Political philosophers of the Enlightenment, from Hobbes and Locke, reaching down to John Rawls and his followers today, have found the roots of political order and the motive of political obligation in a social contract - an agreement, overt or implied, to be bound by principles to which all reasonable citizens can assent. Although the social contract exists in many forms, its ruling principle was announced by Hobbes with the assertion tha.. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 5aec8ec | The recent experience of totalitarianism in Europe was foreshadowed at the French Revolution, when the Committee of Public Safety acted in the same way as the Nazi and Communist parties, setting up 'parallel structures' through which to control the state and to exert a micromanagerial tyranny over every aspect of civil society. Let us at least be realistic, and recognize that, if totalitarian governments have arisen and spread with such rap.. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 4973c30 | The Czech novelist Milan Kundera made a famous observation. 'Kitsch,' he wrote, 'causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: how nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!' Kitsch, in other words, is not about the thing observed but about the observer. It does not invite you to feel moved by the doll you are dressi.. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 3897b12 | The imperfect freedom that property and law make possible, and on which the soixante-huitards depended for their comforts and their excitements, was not enough. That real but relative freedom must be destroyed for the sake of its illusory but absolute shadow. The new 'theories' that poured from the pens of Parisian intellectuals in their battle against the 'structures' of bourgeois society were not theories at all, but bundles of paradox, d.. | Roger Scruton | ||
| f41a934 | We should not be surprised therefore if British conservative thinkers - notably Hume, Smith, Burke and Oakeshott - have tended to see no tension between a defence of the free market and a traditionalist vision of social order. For they have put their faith in the spontaneous limits placed on the market by the moral consensus of the community and have seen both the market and the constraints as the work of the same invisible hand. Maybe that.. | Roger Scruton | ||
| fc86cca | Christians are under an obligation to bear witness to their faith, but this does not mean inflicting their faith on other people or forcibly requiring them to adopt it. As the founder of the Christian faith showed, you bear witness not through triumphing over your rivals but through submitting to their judgement. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 989ed2e | We are not born free, nor do we come into this world with a self-identity and autonomy of our own. We achieve those things, through the conflict and cooperation that weave us into the social fabric. We become freely choosing individuals only by acquiring obligations to parents, siblings, institutions and groups: obligations that we did not choose. | Roger Scruton | ||
| a4f942d | There are many American conservatives, including those influenced by the Roman Catholic tradition of natural law philosophy, who believe that, in the end, the conservative position rests on theological foundations. | Roger Scruton | ||
| f7256b7 | Like the pleasure of friendship, the pleasure in beauty is curious: it aims to understand its object, and to value what it finds. | curious disinterest friendship love pleasure value | Roger Scruton | |
| 5ee3a12 | Here we should notice a peculiar fact: that there are movements which are both essentially involuntary and yet confined to persons - to creatures with a self-conscious perspective. Smiles and blushes are the two most prominent examples. Milton puts the point finely in Paradise Lost: for smiles from Reason flow, To brute denied, and are of love the food. These physiognomic movements owe their rich intentionality to this involuntary charac.. | smile | Roger Scruton |