Notes from Underground Quotes

“The first axiom of Marx Scientist is that everything they tell you is a lie. The second axiom is that it doesn’t matter, since you are lying too. The third axiom is ‘Kill all liars!”
― Roger Scruton, Notes from Underground

“The slaves had been liberated, and turned into morons.”
― Roger Scruton, Notes from Underground

“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, Notes from Underground

“The important thing, Father Pavel had said, is not our belief, but His grace. We refuse His gifts out of meanness, for we fear the cost of them. And yes, the cost is everything.”
― Roger Scruton, Notes from Underground

“I was a lonely adolescent, in a lonely country, where the rules were made for the sake of people who did not pay the cost of them. Our daylight world was one of slogans in which no one believed, of vague prohibitions and joyless celebrations of our benign enslavement. It was a world without friendship, in which every gathering was an object of suspicion, and in which people spoke in whispers for fear that even the most innocent remark could accuse the speaker of a crime.”
― Roger Scruton, Notes from Underground

“Religion, for Father Pavel, involved no escape from the natural into the supernatural, no repudiation of this world for the sake of a better one whose unreality made it more malleable to our wishes. In his perspective, the natural and the supernatural were one and the same: the world became transparent, with the light of eternity shining from the other side.”
― Roger Scruton, Notes from Underground