A society no more exists for the satisfaction of human needs, than a plant exists for its own health.

— Roger Scruton

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

Ideological opinion is not merely distinct from knowledge but the enemy of knowledge.

— Roger Scruton

If he had stayed in Slovenia, and Slovenia had stayed Communist, Size would not have been the nuisance he has since become. Indeed, if there were no greater reason to regret the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, the release of Size on to the world of Western scholarship would perhaps already be a sufficient one.

— 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 convictions as though one could recuperate, at the level of political purpose, the consoling certainty which once was granted by religious faith. In another sense, however, conservatism does rest in a system of belief, and is opposed as much to the theory as to the practice of socialist and liberal politics.

— Roger Scruton

... it is not the taste considered in itself, that we hold to our lips, and you can no more understand the virtues of a wine through a blind tasting than you could understand the virtues of a woman through a blindfold kiss.

— 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 vitality. Nonsense confiscates meaning. It thereby puts truth and falsehood, reason and unreason, light and darkness on an equal footing. It is a blow cast in defense of intellectual freedom, as the optimists construe it, namely the freedom to believe anything at all, provided you feel better for it.

— Roger Scruton

So let us replace the word with a true description. People in our societies own things, their labor 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 labor 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 not freely accept; you can confiscate property or forbid this or that form of it. But if those are the alternatives to ‘capitalism’ there is, now, no real alternative save slavery.

— Roger Scruton

The heretic is the one who speaks against the community from a place within its territory. He is the enemy within. The heathen, by contrast, is safely behind the walls, excluded by his own invincible arrogance.

— Roger Scruton

Then there are the fully intentional pleasures, which, although in some way tied up with sensory or perceptual experience, are modes of exploration of the world. Aesthetic pleasures are like this. Aesthetic pleasures are contemplative - they involve studying an object OUTSIDE the self, to which one is GIVING something (namely, attention and all that flows from it), and not TAKING, as in the pleasure that comes from drugs and drinks. Hence, such pleasures are not addictive - there is no pathway to reward that can be short-circuited here, and a serotonin injection is not a cheap way of obtaining the experience of PARISIAN or THE MERCHANT OF VENICE.

— Roger Scruton