Roger Scruton Quotations

In literary representation, the distinction between the genuinely erotic and the licentious is a distinction not of subject-matter, but of perspective. The genuinely erotic work is one which invites the reader to re-create in imagination the first-person point of view of someone party to an erotic encounter. The pornographic work retains as a rule the third-person perspective of the voyeuristic observer.

The relation of the soul to the body is like that of a house to its bricks. The soul is a principle of organisation, which governs the flesh and endows it with meaning. It is no more separable from the flesh than is the house from its bricks, even if the soul may survive the gradual replacement of every bodily part.

The core of common culture is religion. Tribes survive and flourish because they have gods, who fuse many wills into a single will, and demand and reward the sacrifices on which social life depends.

Like adverts, today's works of art aim to create a brand, even if they have no product to sell except themselves.

Sanctions make a substantial contribution to power based on privation, and they have never hurt a single despot in the whole history of their use.

Sometimes the intention is to shock us. But what is shocking first time around is boring and vacuous when repeated.

In all the areas of life where people have sought and found consolation through forbidding their desires-sex in particular, and taste in general-the habit of judgment is now to be stamped out.

This "knowing what to do"... is a matter of having the right purpose, the purpose appropriate to the situation in hand... The one who "knows what to do" is the one on whom you can rely to make the best shot at success, whenever success is possible.

The welfare state that is built upon this conception seems to prove precisely away from the conservative conception of authoritative and personal government, towards a labyrinthine privilege sodden structure of anonymous power, structuring a citizenship that is increasingly reluctant to answer for itself, increasingly parasitic on the dispensations of a bureaucracy towards which it can feel no gratitude.

The sexual parts are not only vivid examples of the body's dominion; they are also apertures whose damp emissions and ammoniac smells testify to the mysterious putrefaction of the body.