Gentle Regrets Quotes

“The common law of England is proof that there is a real distinction between legitimate and illegitimate power, that power can exist without oppression, and that authority is a living force in human conduct. English law, I discovered, is the answer to Foucault.”
― Roger Scruton, Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life

“It seems to me, therefore, that you should prepare your children to be happy in the way that you are happy. Treat them exactly as you would if your own ideals were generally shared. After all, your ideals, like your children, define you: between them, they are all that you have.”
― Roger Scruton, Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life

“And so I acquired the consciousness of death and dying, without which the world cannot be loved for what it is. That, in essence, is what it means to be a conservative.”
― Roger Scruton, Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life

“For Antonia conservative beliefs were legacies, things that come down in the family like hideous portraits or Habsburg jaws, but which, like any inherited disability, should never be openly mentioned. To discover a convert, who adopted the old Tory doctrines not out of genetic necessity but because he thought them to be true, was, for her, like coming across someone who had hired a plastic surgeon to give him a Habsburg jaw. What in her husband was a matter of breeding and therefore unnoticeable was, in me, a self-inflicted wound, an embarrassing stigma from which one must avert one’s gaze.”
― Roger Scruton, Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life

“Far from being the evil and obnoxious thing that my contemporaries held it to be, authority was, for Burke, the root of political order. Society, he argued, is not held together by the abstract rights of the citizen, as the French Revolutionaries supposed. It is held together by authority – by which is meant the right to obedience, rather than the mere power to compel it.”
― Roger Scruton, Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life

“People reason collectively towards a common goal only in times of emergency – when there is a threat to be vanquished, or a conquest to be achieved. Even then, they need organization, hierarchy and a structure of command if they are to pursue their goal effectively. Nevertheless, a form of collective rationality does emerge in these cases, and its popular name is war. Moreover”
― Roger Scruton, Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life

“Take but degree away, untune that string, And, hark! What discord follows: each thing meets In mere oppugnancy … … The general’s disdained By him one step below, he by the next, That next by him beneath; so every step, Exampled by the first place that is sick Of his superior, grows to an envious fever Of pale and bloodless emulation.”
― Roger Scruton, Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life

“kind of collective effort to improve the world. ‘We are not asked to undo the work of creation or to rectify the Fall. The duty of a Christian is not to leave this world a better place. His duty is to leave this world a better man.”
― Roger Scruton, Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life

“was not to change things, or to be part of things, or to be swept along by things, that I made my pilgrimage to Paris. It was to observe, to know, to understand. And so I acquired the consciousness of death and dying, without which the world cannot be loved for what it is. That, in essence, is what it means to be a conservative.”
― Roger Scruton, Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life

“Burke brought home to me that our most necessary beliefs may be both unjustified and unjustifiable from our own perspective, and that the attempt to justify them will lead merely to their loss.”
― Roger Scruton, Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life

“unexalted forms. Burke was not writing about socialism, but about revolution. Nevertheless, he persuaded me that the Utopian promises of socialism go hand in hand with a wholly abstract vision of the human mind – a geometrical version of our mental processes that has only the vaguest relation to the thoughts and feelings by which real human lives are conducted. He persuaded me that societies are not and cannot be organized according to a plan or a goal, that there is no direction to history, and no such thing as moral or spiritual progress. Most of all he emphasized that the new forms of politics, which hope to organize society around the rational pursuit of liberty, equality, fraternity or their modernist equivalents, are actually forms of militant irrationality.”
― Roger Scruton, Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life

“were simply alarmist reactions to an ill-understood event. What interested me in the Reflections was the positive political philosophy, distinguished from all the literature that was currently à la mode, by its absolute concretion, and its close reading of the human psyche in its ordinary and unexalted forms.”
― Roger Scruton, Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life

“Modernism in architecture was an attempt to remake the world as though it contained nothing save atomic individuals, disinfected of the past, and living like ants within their metallic and functional shells.”
― Roger Scruton, Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life